Goddess

 
Scarlet flowers surround the wild shrine  
in the grove where devotees dance,  
drinking heavily from a bilva fruit husk  
 
while jackals circle as a yellow serpent  
emerges from my body to devour  
each newborn issue of your loins.  
 
I dance bare-breasted upon your  
corpse, my Shiva, the orgiastic spiral  
of my limbs to the gourd-lute,  
 
stoned on your blood and stoned.  
Shaktas sing you back to life, and to  
the darkness of my craggy grotto.  
 
Songs written on century paper,  
moldering into extinction from ev’ry  
monsoon & my comely drunkenness,

jealously coveted as divine property.
These songs to the Goddess,
fell’d from heaven & caught in my hair.





* Goddess Parvati is the Hindu deity of virility and love (Wife of Lord Shiva).  
* The pilgrimage to attain the freedom from the pain of rebirth.  
* Shaktas = Bengal devotees