Full Text of the Poem "Blue Lotus" by Meena Alexander

Blue Lotus

Meena Alexander

'It is not enough to cover the rock with leaves'
Wallace Stevens

I

Twilight, I stroll through stubble fields

clouds lift, the hope of a mountain.

What was distinct turns to mist,

what was fitful burns the heart.

When I dream of my tribe gathering

by the red soil of the Pamba River

I feel my writing hand split at the wrist.

Dark tribute or punishment, who can tell?

You kiss the stump and where the wrist

Bone was, you set the stalk of a lotus.

There is a blue lotus in my grandmother’s garden,

its petals whirl in moonlight like this mountain.

II

An altar, a stone cracked down the spine,

a shelter, a hovel of straw and sperm

out of which rise a man and a woman

and one is a ghost though I cannot tell which

for the sharpness between them scents

even the orchids, a sharing of things

invisible till the mountain fetches

itself out of water out of ice out of sand

and they each take tiny morsels

of the mountain and set it on banana leaves

and as if it were a feast of saints

they cry out to their dead and are satisfied.

III

I have climbed the mountain and cleared

away the sand and ice using first my bare hands

then a small knife. Underneath I found

the sign of the four-cornered world, gammadion,

which stands for migration, for the scattering

of the people. The desolation of the mothers

singing in their rock houses becomes us,

so too the child at the cliff’s edge

catching a cloud in her palm

as stocks of blood are gathered on the plain,

spread into sheaves, a circlet for bones

and flint burns and the mountain resurrects itself.

IV

Tribe, tribute, tribulation:

to purify the tongue and its broken skin

I am learning the language again,

a new speech for a new tribe.

How did I reach this nervous empire,

sharp store of sense?

Donner un sens plus pur etc. etc.

does not work so well anymore,

nor calme bloc ici-bas.

Blunt metals blossom.

Children barter small arms.

Ground rules are abolished.

The earth has no capitals.

In my distinct notebooks

I write things of this sort.

Monsoon clouds from the shore

near my grandmother’s house

float through my lines.

I take comfort in sentences.

“Who cares what you write?”

someone cries.

A hoarse voice, I cannot see the face.

He smells like a household ghost.

There can be no concord between us.

I search out a bald rock between two trees,

ash trees on the riverbank

on an island where towers blazed.

This is my short

incantation,

my long way home.

William, Rabindranath, Czeslaw,

Mirabai, Anna, Adrienne

reach out your hands to me.

Now stones have tongues.

Sibilant scattering,

stormy grace!