KICKING It In KATHMANDU

Chilling IT In KHUMBU

WILL CROW HIGH IN THE HIMALAYA #2 24 POEMS

HIGH

IN THE

HIMALAYA

KICKING it IN KATHMANDU

Chilling it in KHumbu

WILL CROW

24 POEMS®

Website: www.brotherwillcrow.co Communicate: crowkawskaws@gmail.com Volume 2 in the 24 poems series® Version 2.0

brotherWill Crow resides in Sarangkot, Pokhara, Nepal, as well as in San

Francisco and Grass Valley, California. With appreciation and an internet

connection, he lives the simple, natural, sustainable lifestyle of rural Nepal. He is

a prize-winning San Francisco poet. Profits from this book are donated to The

Prem Rawat Foundation’s Food for People in Bantoli, Nepal.

First light, sleeping city.

Early risers, quiet routes.

Temple bell, silence shatters.

Prayers wheel, blessings rattle.

Sunlight spills, children echo.

Old men sit, babies toddle.

Brown dirt swirls, fine dust colors.

Motorbikes, chickens… pigeons and pundits …

Temple square bustles.

Buddthas of brass,

Eyes unblinking,

Smile serenely…

Amid flowers and food.

On the trees along the streets

Along the acres of ground,

Along the palace gardens groomed once for the pleasure of the Plutocrat the hereditary King,

On the trees along the gardens above the grounds surrounding Kathmandu’s new national public

museum,

There were many more Crows than I could count.

They had come to roost, come to caw, caw cacophony into the end of the daylight.

Hundreds and hundreds and then more hundreds of piercing, ominous-eyed, midnight-black

Crows… Crows who covered the heights of all the tall trees.

Crows who had come to watch the humans pass below.

Kathmandu holds them in low esteem.

But lower, held as low as it goes are dogs.

O the poor street dogs who do have so very much to cry howling about.

They’re lives are tense and short.

I am told the dogs have been born to suffer their prior misdeeds.

What a concept.

So with kicks and stones and curses

They are helped towards higher births, helped by the high-born, self-certain humans.

Again, as I fall asleep

My hand on the hip of she who loves me,

I am appreciating the depth of my love for the female,

My love for her round profound baby-making body.

O I bow down to you woman.

This loving, desirous wonder is wired into me.

I will miss your lean sinewy Tibetan flesh.

God is such a game master.

The whimper of a dog passes up into our hotel room

And its whine travels into me.

It whines from hunger I think.

Oh, the hardship here of overpopulation…

Too many people, too many dogs.

It is a hardship this city revolves around.

It is a hardship, a chaos that the Crows take advantage of…

O the keen-witted, omnipresent Crows.

Listening to the dog, I am again reminded of what consciousness is…

What I am… what the dog is.

What the crows, the rats, the ubiquitous pigeons, people, and I are…

Are here herded together bound within the same awareness,

Each focusing on the same struggle.

I am not omniscient.

I am only built to open my mind to what interests me.

My journey has been a tour into the attractions offered as time flows by.

In the end I am the appetites born of blood and body.

I am at its subtlest a hunger for love and bliss.

My hunger craves to mainline the enthusiasm.

The poor dog wakes me at four AM,

This time it is plaintively crying.

Its voice is sheer sharp want. Misery.

I hear a commanding grow.

I visualize an intimidating, a meaner dog.

The two dogs have come upon an eatable prize.

The plaintive whiner will be torn open if it comes any closer.

It can only cry. It is the same cry of desperation

A ragged Kathmandu street junkie can only cry inwardly from a starved need.

I know that cry.

It is my heart’s cry in the absence of joy.

It is my heart’s cry in the absence of divine inner connection.

What are such as my woman’s form and warmth to me

When I can feel nothing but the emptiness…

Emptiness of my inner need gone unfed?

God is such a game master.

Tomorrow I will be flying away, again a lone traveler: Delhi, Kuala Lumpur, LAX, SFO.

And all in all, all in me, in inner me…

All will remain thankfully the same.

I will be positioned by love’s fountain

And I will be begging like a junkie

Begging for its enthusiasm and transcendence…

Beg the secret stream that flows shining within.

The Cumulous lairs

Of the Thundering Dragons are

Tremendous in the distance…

Are magnificent …

As they rumble from far heights.

Their craggy, cottony pillars

Soak in the saffron of the setting sun.

The ferocious pummeling of black rain

Has come and gone.

We sit here feeling

Small and grateful in

This tin-roofed shelter,

Having borne firsthand

The might of celestial power.

Damp white cloud covers

Hushes this high Himal ridge.

Near tree looms ghostly.

The birds and I, we wait the sun.

Clear cool October night

Silent slow Cumulous clouds

Built loftily, float gently.

Behind, the moon peeks

Grand edifices etched in silver

Monsoon’s wet torrents are done.

Rice harvest nears.

The mothers of sons

Dressed in married red

Chatter…

Bent, hands to the dirt,

Clear the lines of corn.

Like Old Poet is doing upstairs

To his field of words.

“Eighteen stories tall

Now Kathmandu’s highest”

Taxi man proudly proclaims.

“Oh dear,” Old Poet thinks,

“Capitalism is devouring

The heartfelt humanity of Nepal.”

Within silence

The divine sounds…

I sit and settle

In this noisy city…

Sit and settle to hear the uni-verse’s quiet jubilance.

In the Center of Time

Here is no-time.

Here silence rings,

Here serenity soaks,

Here love moves

Effortlessly

Silently

Enthusiastically

I am awed.

Here in your cultivation… here in the comfort of your cloister…

Your garden roses hang full and heavy,

Hang heavy with the richness of blood.

Behind, blanketing the hill, Rhododendrons

Weave a pattern of clean spring green and bright blossoming red.

I am rough, rough compared to your delicacies.

(But no, I am not entirely a reptile, a reptile

Whose walnut of a brain in the back of my skull

Would have me lay in the sun surveying this territory,

And call you my own and hiss and even roar when others approach.

Nor am I a monkey, a monkey among monkeys,

Swung up near you into one of the overhanging fruit trees,

Rude and unruly as I spit debris to the ground

And chatter ceaselessly to occupy you)

Yes, I sit pleasurably with graceful you on plump embroidered cushions,

On the intricately etched glass of the carved wood table is a pot of perfect Ilam leaf-tip tea,

Is a plate of ripe purpled plums, and another of crisp sweet finger-cookies you’ve confected.

I am admiring the enthusiasm in your quick eyes as they dance amid the beauty of black lashes.

I admire the curve of your shoulder running down from the femininity of your neck.

I watch the brown eloquence of your long-tapered fingers as they slip around the fine white of

your delicate cup.

Tea… sipping tea in the soft welcomed warmth of spring outdoors.

Delicious… cultivated... civilized… venerable.

You speak of my poems.

You speak with recognition, understanding.

You quote a line.

I speak of Hafiz, Rumi, Shams and the Sufis.

We sip our tea. I am in paradise.

A thousand bulldozers are digging into the Himalaya.

Nepal is being carved, is being pushed down sliding into the Ganges.

And still the wind and snow against the 8000 meters of rock blast,

Blast… and still the clouds before the peaks of the Himalaya bulge,

Bulge thick and pregnant with the moisture of the Bay of Bengal.

And still the water streams down washing away the white clay, washes away the orange soil,

Washes the mountains’ flanks into the rapidness of white rivers,

Washes into the churn of mud-orange torrents…

Streams down as it has for millennia while the Himalaya unerringly uplift.

But today I see the dozers clawing gashes of roads.

The dozers roar and gush diesel and dust and heedlessly offend the air.

A thousand dozers work at making the crudeness of capitalism available…

Available in the mountain primeval that is Nepal.

Twenty million Nepali will buy mobile phones and will spend again and again to replace their

chargers.

For a thousand years, Nepalis have walked trails,

Moved herds to the green richness of Himalayian pastures.

Moved up in the summer, down in the winter.

Calm was their life; nature was their truth.

In her bosom they were secure.

The land, the rain, the livestock provided.

For a thousand years in the scant villages,

The villagers stored and crafted and shared.

Traded with traders come weeks of distances.

No great armies, no invading kings came to challenge,

Came to conquer, to walk the slight trails of the sheer verticalness of the land

And plunder the small populations.

For a thousand years the farmers were grateful.

Before them was the sacredness, the loftiness,

The celestial face of the primeval, the purity of white peak.

And they felt the essential grandeur…

Witnessed the majesty of the divine realm…

Of the snowy rock abodes which furnished or destroyed,

Which blessed or not.

Life was lived to receive, to reverence, to serve.

For a thousand years the Nepali psyche has been held aloft

For the Himalaya house larger spirits

Than the mere thinness of men can contrive.

Sunwards, millet lifts…

Lifts fists gloved in brown beads.

Big red wasps abound.

Old Poet marvels,

“Who are these wasps,

Only seen when millet fruits?”

One week, three hailstorms...

Young corn stands totally tattered.

Old Poet is not worried

Fresh leaves are now being born.

Surprised and upset

Big handsome cricket cringes.

Old Poet apologizes.

Your rock home seemed the right size

To secure my decrepit door.

Mouse runs on city street.

Suddenly in front Black Kite

Dives and plucks. Its wing’s

Wind whips Old Poet’s face.

Such danger driving a motorbike.

A Black Kite is a raptor native

to the Indian Subcontinent

Peaks above… far above…

Rock-still… snow-encrusted… solid…

Fearsome… ethereal.

And below, far below…

The narrow valley is a nest of life.

The silver slice of a river is a vein that feeds…

Feeds the green of walled Yak pastures, feeds the leafy cover of potato patches…

Feeds these fields blanketed by the morning’s mist.

Soon the sun with its animating might will burn…

Will burn finally, will burn the night’s cloud cover away.

There are no roads, no electric lines.

Rather, the harmony of the flow of centuries empowers.

The ancient path into the village is portal-ed,

Its lime-coated dome of antiquity

Has been painted again and again…

Is painted with depictions of the ever-seeing, all-embracing Consciousness which

protects…

Is painted with the blue-robbed, gold-shining, lotus-sitting Buddtha…

The Buddtha that lives as the awakened awareness within each person.

Is depicted with the singular Consciousness that, generation after generation,

The villagers’ inner endeavor is to surrender into peacefully.

The quiet of heaven rests within the natural quiet of the steep valley.

Serenity soaks, soaks life, soaks the plush green of this valley’s blanket,

Soaks the life which rises up to its limits on the grand mountains’ hard stone flanks.

The peace of sunlight soaks, soaks all of us here below.

Full winter sun warms this soft morning.

O the glory…

O Nepal…

O Earth.

My vision caresses the stirring jungle-skinned sculpture of the parading hills.

A pair of stately eagles riding a thermal circle down to regard me …

And then too come the quick Kites.

The Mongoose den-ed in the bank of the rice patty stops, lifts on hindlegs, and eyeballs me…

Me sitting in the sun not far away against the wall.

I do not move a muscle; she sniffs my scent.

We remain cordial. … neighbors…

The married Myna Birds have come as they often do

To sit the electric line next to my house.

They click and chatter back and forth.

I am fond of them.

They are gentlefolk… are so present and observing.

(And perhaps they remember me from last fall and my food-scrap pile collecting under the pole.)

Seven and eight, two boys…

Boys from a village higher and remote…

Here at the old Brahmin’s home

For the anniversary of their grandmother’s death

Came over. Over for sweets.

For I am a marvel, a foreigner.

Buttons, into my home, buttons, switches,

Buttons are the fascination

Are their lust.

In their world,

In their world without roads, wires,

People walk,

Their work is their food, their farm, their village…

Their work is dirt, livestock, grass, compost, bamboo, jungle, biosphere.

Feet and fingers harvest, process, prepare, weave, cut, carve…

Fabricate from the sustainable. Hands sustain the world…

A world without buttons.

There are those few with mobile phones,

Phones with buttons that light…

Light and bring the miracle of telecommunication.

But in my home, I have so many other buttons…

Light switches, the electric cooker, a coffee grinder, a Bluetooth audio speaker,

The solar inverter, my computer…

(Oh my laptop is nothing but a fabulous opportunity of buttons)

I could not keep their hands off.

Each button needed pushing,

Each button a magic that brings forth a revelation…

A result that astonished.

Magic.

Buttons.

Crow notes,” Brahmin is a Hindu caste. Entry is by birth only. The Brahmin Caste, similar to the

Hebrew Levite Kohanim Tribe, serves as the elite, privileged, priest class.”

April lily upright,

Naked lips tremble, sun touches,

Soft petals open pink.

Furious wind charges,

Dark rain’s torment pummels.

Pliant, withdrawn, bending,

Again lily awaits radiance’s kiss.

More skeleton than not,

Rooted at the edge of the paddy’s drop,

Spring’s restlessness has not been kind to the small shrub.

Wind and hail

Goats and the sickle slices of the buffalo keepers

Have taken their toll.

It survives with a few twigs in leaf.

But she has won me over

I have become her lover.

A scarlet bright flower has opened from the heart of her.

Tenderly the September dawn warms.

Old Poet sits amid the profusion of relatives…

Sits in the lap of Mother Gaia as all, wet with the brush of dew, are

awakening.

From the top of the burgeoning Bamboo the resident Bubol Birds sing

sweetly.

Their voices ripple through Old Poet.

He sings ardently too…

For within… the hands of his breath…

His hollow flute plays.

She stood crying.

The boy cried too, he her nephew…

Stood crying, crying together alongside her older sister, his mother, clinging…

For she had just been given to the man….

To the man from over two hundred kilometers away…

Crying because it will be such a long time before she will see her own again.

At twenty-seven she was no longer sought.

And she had been married twice before.

Arranged, the first the big deal,

Dowry and invitations and a band.

The boy drunkard and cruel

She fled.

The second, a local, a man contracted to work in Saudi,

A long distant arrangement…

Arranged through a broker.

But when the man came home again

He slept at his girlfriend’s house…

Ignoring his parents,

Who had paid for a proper bride, though at a bargain.

Now she has been given to this new man.

The man with his brother who had spent months searching.

She fit the need; she was healthy, attractive.

She had no dowry; she was used.

There would be no ceremony.

She had said yes,

Yes, after meeting him for tea twice at her sister’s.

The man had seemed considerate.

He was forty with an eleven-year-old son

And a nine-month old baby…

A baby whose birth had taken the life of the wife…

A baby who needed a mother.

Her sister and brother-in-law were pleased and relieved.

Her circumstance had been desperate.

A single woman without support is a burden.

She was happy to be wanted and her life secured…

An instant family, an instant mom…

And with the conceiving of a baby of her own,

She would be as respectable as any wife.

Marriage is a business, a negotiation…

A means of survival, the necessary endeavor.

Her character was good, good of habit and humble.

If he is the same, love will flourish.

A difficult bed

The cawing conversations of crows

A nervous dog in the distance

Dawn comes unwelcomed.

_ Paknajol District, Kathmandu, 2017

First light, sleeping city.

Early workers wend their way.

Temple bell, shattered silence.

Prayer wheels, blessings bong.

Sunlight comes… children echo…

The brown of dust abounds.

Old men, babies and mothers…

Motorbikes, chickens,

Pundits and pigeons

Busy upon the ground.

Ganesh gazes forth,

Given treats, smiles serenely.

It was wrong.

Here in the temple square,

Here upon the antique bricks,

There were no ants.

Upon the roof parapets, the ledges

There were pigeons,

Pigeons gliding, landing, launching…

Launching across the unhappy, clouded, thick afternoon sky.

Crows were a constant noise, alive,

Here in the temple square,

Here where there were no ants policing the debris and dust.

I sat on a wall

As I had done in the morning.

Again, I had come to feel the air,

To be in the clutter and the constant bustle,

Had come to enjoy the fascination that are faces.

That morning I had noticed the old old woman,

Tiny, so tiny, tucked away in a sunny small corner of the square.

Another aged, ancient widowed woman wrapped warmly.

Another among the many wrapped, the many that come to be surrounded

By the marketplace and the gladness of the day.

Again, in the late afternoon, returning,

I sat in the last light.

My endeavors done,

Sat across from the old woman.

It seemed she had not moved since I’d last seen.

She had covered her head and face with her shawl.

To a nearby shop, to a stout woman noticing, I gestured my question.

She called to the tiny bundle…called loudly but to no answer.

The shop woman approached; she lifted the shawl.

The old old woman was dead.

Dead stiff, sat unnaturally still.

Her eyes were blank, were vacant of the light…

Of the light that is life’s shining.

Dead, her slight weight, her stick like legs, her bone fingered hands were rigid.

Her face, the wrinkled weathered skin, was ashen… ashen… unnatural.

As her life had receded, it seemed that into her head it had shrunk …

Shrunk leaving a skull of leathered bone skeletal beneath thick white hair.

O how my heart was touched. How my love embraced her.

This wee woman wrinkled to brown hide.

This mountain peasant whose person had lived the whole of a life…

Had lived a life of duty, of passions, of toil. Of love.

This woman whose body had journeyed through its natural cycle.

This woman whose dead flesh still spoke of health…

Of the health of her habits, of the stature of her diligence.

This woman who had lived as a wife to a man…

Lived as a mate who had accepted her husband’s humanness…

Lived responsible to her duty, lived responsible to her duty to her heart…

Lived as a mother whose care, whose kitchen, whose farming

Fed her family.

O I could see within dead her, within her finished flesh, her history…

Could see the imprint of her love of life once burning…

Could see within her, her command…

Could see the quality, the wisdom embedded…

Embedded in the alignment of her nervous system.

See that she had been a careful, realized person.

See within her, coded her satori, her liberation.

See she had died a carful, realized death…

See she had come to these holy temples knowing death was near…

See she had come sagely to this opening, this opening out into the sky…

See she had arranged carefully her finish.

The stout woman was all business.

She called to her fellow shopkeepers to assist.

She said she knew the woman.

The woman came to the square often over the last few years,

Came at times with perhaps a daughter…

That they should leave the dead woman there,

There on the wall upright sitting covered with a white shroud, face open,

Shrouded until someone who knew her village name

Came and claimed her.

The stout woman nodded at me.

I smiled an appreciative smile.

She smiled and turned back into her shop.

In the constant of the cawing of crows

And amidst the cooing of pigeons,

In the unsettling absence of ants

With the sun setting in front of me

All returned to the state of peace.

Patan Durbar, Kathmandu, Jan 27, 2017

From the far village below

The death horn intones

The death horn intones.

January is dying time.

Dark damp cold clutches.

Frail, withered, flesh fights no more.

Circling Boodha Stupa

As I passed by, I thought she was a man.

But my friend having yesterday put a hundred rupee note in her bowl

Had called her Amma, grandmother.

Her head was furry with white stubble,

Her face, weathered rough, was leather,

Her eyes, hidden within wrinkles, were slits.

She wore layers beneath a dark wool overcoat soiled.

A bundle, humble, of possessions sat positioned at her side.

The maroon, soon, of a nun’s robe showed beneath.

She had obviously given up pretense.

Her concern was no longer to be a nun, but to survive as she wandered.

And I? Who am I?

I am the full love that comes gently from my eyes.

She looked at me, acknowledged my look.

She took me in and spoke…

Spoke so matter of factly… spoke as if she was giving directions to somewhere down the

street…

Spoke as if my ears, too, might be dumb, plugged with the human condition.

Spoke surgically:

“If you want peace, live simply. Require nothing.”

“If you want health, eat simply. Treasure your body, sleep well.”

“If you want truth, exist by the daily labor of your muscles.”

“If you want love, give openly. Be kind.”

“If you want enlightenment, know death. Be without expectation.”

“If you want bliss, live with gratitude. Free your heart.”

“If you want to select a wife, know her mother. Avoid appearances.”

“If you want to have a good marriage, dedicate. Serve.”

“If you want to be a success, do not offend. Do not take offence.”

“If you want to be fulfilled, be healthy, peaceful, loving, truthful.”

“If you are humble, gratitude and enlightenment will come following.”

She watched as I listened, knew I had stayed with her.

Her eyes like lasers, caught mine.

“One is here, or one is not.”

“There is nowhere else, nothing else, only here.”

“Truth exists in only what is here in front.”

“Either awareness is here in oneness,

Or it sleeps, trapped in the dreaming of a self.”

Drinking again…

Here in this Thamel tourist bar here in Kathmandu here in Nepal.

The girls, the comely ones, ones with the secret in their eyes, have become intimates of mine.

Tourist girls and the brown Nepali, the girls, the sweet smiling females

Carrying forth, their little round bellies, the way of their hips

Are calling to me, their wombs, sirens, call,

Their blood whispers to me, giggles…

And God keeps telling me

There are so many babies,

So many of my babies waiting in heaven,

So many in the light of heaven waiting in wombs,

So many wanting to be born.

My new friend Jeff has drunk everyone under the table.

And he talks on, a brilliant one.

Lectures while my beaming handsome-ness is out beyond being waltzed about by the woman,

Waltzing with one after another, around and around, dancing, my eyes and the girls’…

We are still listening to him.

He worked for the Embassy. He had importance…

He knows things… is bitter.

Government is one motherfucking pile of corrupt collusion.

Is the dogs, is the big jowled bullies banding together greedily.

Snarling when they need to.

It’s not that they need more, it’s not that they don’t have the power…

It’s that they’re afraid of losing. Fear… fear scrambling.

The bigger their territory, the more their terror.

The higher their position, the harder they’ll fall,

The greater their evil, the greater their pain.

Instead, I speak of the world, of the world of people as a realm of consciousness…

Of everyone contributing to an agreement…

Contributing to the unifying conceptualization… contributing their conscious visualization.

Government is not the will of the people but a realization of the cosmos.

The higher the understanding, the less governing is needed.

And Jeff, Jewish, somehow smelling the stink of religion,

Starts in on the O blessed, sanctified, utterly sadistic crucifixion of Jesus…

What a weird, ghastly metaphor…

Who could think that such forgiveness matters…

Think they can really really attain safety while remaining their very own sinful pathology…

Consider themselves saved, while they refuse to tolerate the natural love they simply are.

Really.

Their disconnection, their delusion, their debauchery holds their trust.

And the hook in them is baited with displays of seductive virgins and a paradise like Bali.

A paradise pledged once they’ve been relieved of responsibility.

No nothing needs saving…

No nothing needs forgiveness.

You don’t.

Is there anything really wrong…

Other than your credit card is at its limit and your girl/boyfriend complains too much.

It’s late.

My eyes want to shut, my nerves want to close shop.

The girls have gone to sleep,

Most seem to have vanished.

A few have curled about me.

Jeff continues drinking on…

Words, words spilling out in grand heaps, surround.

Goodnight mad Jeff, goodnight bar…

Goodnight world, goodnight ladies… goodnight babies.

Peace is in the still-point of consciousness.

It has no words, no language.

It is the is-ness that is embracing…

And into it, to sleep, I curl.

I knew my self

As an island of flesh

As an island of thoughts

Amid an unfamiliar sea.

And my occupation

Was to fish for who I was.

I would land variations of what others considered valuable…

Charm, intelligence, confidence, affluence, attractiveness, power,

independence, knowledge.

Now I rest in breath,

Rest in its presence.

Who I am is…

Is what is enthusiastic,

Is what is authentic.

Is what is kind-love,

And this island now belongs to the sea.

In the night

When the leopard stood at my door and grunted,

My heart nearly failed… jumped palpitating.

Then I understood the frailness I occupy…

Then I realized that my desires and my hopes are troublesome, are cumbersome…

Then I found my profundity to be of no consequence.

Now I try and accept…

Now I try to allow life to be just as it is.

Now I feel the wind blowing by…

The wind which is blowing me to my death.

Only kind-love stands secure unmoving.

The three-old

Rode her tricycle

Onto the pundit’s cloth.

Rolled onto the white linen holding scriptural text, flowers, holy water,

incense…

Rode into the purity of that correct ritual on the floor.

The Pundit

Intoning on and on,

Before the alter

Sitting amid the sacred,

Working the gods for blessings…

Pundit-ji

Bolted up, stood amazingly suddenly straight…

Was an upright fist of shock

That instantly pulled the child rudely off and up by the arm

And the tricycle with the other…

Walked impatiently across the courtyard

And dumped the tricycle over the wall,

Placed the girl down with

His face screwed severely…

Said,

“Ride your bike into the temple yard again

And God will punish you.”

Ok ratty,

Ok rat you can share my house.

I know you prefer the protection of a human house.

I know that comfort to me, is comfort to you.

Ok just don’t think you’re gonna share my food.

Got it?

Tight, damn tight, I’m gonna lock it up.

Get over it, you can’t gnaw into it,

Gnaw as long and hard as you will.

Yes, I understand,

From the start,

Rats and people,

Dogs and people, rats and cats.

We are the family mammalian.

And yes, I understand…

You rats were the progenitors.

You where there when the great meteor hit...

There when the climate changed radically.

Great Grandmother was there…

Underground… warm and safe… nested…

Eating anything, eating everything…

Eating for eons the losers as they fell.

And from her, the Pleistocene Proto-Rat,

We the warm milk-sucking mammals have come.

Ok ratty,

Elder sister, share my space.

Me, I take the day shift… you, the night shift.

But be warned,

Too many babies

Too many,

And you’re gone.

Come far, home at last,

Old Poet is warmed by his welcome.

The monkeys have remembered.

In his yard babies play.

Peach tree’s fruit has been stripped.

The tribe of monkeys

Came through today… came as they do with the season.

Came with the budding of the Rhododendron and the new sweet leafing.

Came through as their antecedents have come through.

Came through this ridge of Nepali rice farms.

Came through today on the way to the mountain-side high jungle, jungle that is their spring

forage.

Comfort is in canopies of deciduousness.

I heard the first of the salvos,

Heard the threats and shouts.

Rising at dawn,

The farm families had caught the monkeys raiding...

Potatoes, wheat almost ripe on the stalk, radish, peas on the vine…

The monkeys will decimate.

The Monkeys have it worked out

As have the farmers.

A bit is taken, given.

The Monkeys faint an attack…

The farmers shout, throw stones…

Others hiding, waiting on the flank, move in and raid hastily

And are gone before the farm boys who are fast can chase.

Just like an army on the move,

All is up for grabs.

All opportunities must be taken to survive.

No slouches, the Monkeys are armed with intelligence.

They compute in nano-seconds and act strategically.

They make few sounds,

But communicate impeccably.

They know this route up and down.

This is an untended corridor rife with trees,

And here, there are no dogs.

The big adult males come first, the vanguard.

Smaller males next, then the young females.

When it is safe

The mothers with babies and the youngsters come cautiously behind.

My house, my farm is at the edge by the trees.

They came last year and ate my radishes, the green peaches.

I did not mind, I watched.

The elders have remembered and have navigated here.

I wait, hearing their progress up the mountain

Heralded by shouts of farmwives, they arrive scouting.

A lookout is atop my tin roof, his footfalls echoing.

I offer ears of corn form my storage.

They watch, I throw.

Three meters is an acceptable proximity.

They are hungry.

The biggest male collects three I’ve thrown.

The others watch waiting till he moves on.

I throw more. The pecking order is obeyed.

They scamper up into the trees and eat and watch.

The vanguard goes.

And in minutes the young males arrive.

I throw and they are bold.

The females arrive; they are skittish.

I throw and they scatter.

Then dash in to retrieve while I watch in full view.

Finding me not a threat, they adjust.

Sometime later, I am surprised by the number.

My yard is filled with moms and children…

With red faced, red thighed females…

Females with long worked nipples.

Babies ride top their mothers’ hips,

Their tiny toes and fingers clutching hair.

I throw my corn, I try to count,

But my yard is a circus.

I think there are 8 females, 13 kids

But the kids are acting like a pack of lunatics.

Scampering, scavenging, climbing, jumping amazingly up and onto anything about.

Wrestling… running on my roof…

They peek around the tin edge, their faces upside down…

Look at me looking.

I want to throw lots of corn,

But the farm boys have organized

And are heading down.

Their missiles of stones are starting to hit in my yard.

In seconds the tribe is gone.

Disappeared over the bank into the foliage.

Thanks Endless thanks to Prem Rawat Who gave me the keys to the room of inner joy

For more on Prem Rawat: wopg.org (words of peace..org)

premrawat.com

Within

Within life,

Roots the enthusiastic Essence.

This I have been shown.

This is the Beloved,

Is the beloved primal unchanging presence,

And perceived

Brings me to a feeling of glad belonging.

Brings a oneness.

Here within may the enthusiasm that is the Divine blossom!

Crow quotes, “And here is answer to a world of questions.”