Who Dares To Take This Life From Me, Knows No Better: Parts Five and Six

(continued) V Has it not occurred to you how I sat with you dear sister, counting the chicking back of the evening train by the window sill and then got up to wind my way down the snake infested rail to shoo shoo the cows home to brood while you gee gee-d the chicks to coop and did we not then plan of a farm a green milking farm to warm the palm then turned to scratch the itch over in our minds lay down on the floors, mat aside our thoughts to cushion heads whilst dug tapioca roots heaped the dream and we lay scraping the kernel-less fiber shelled coconuts O Bhama, my goatless daughter kid how I nursed you with the callow calves those mutual moments forced in these common lives and then, that day when they sold you the blistering shirtless sun never flinching an eye, defiant I stood caressing your creamy coat and all you could say was a hopeless baaa..a..aa and then, then, that day as we came over the mountains two kids you led to the thorny brush, business bent the eye-balling bharata natyam VI O masters of my fading August dream For should you take this life from me Know you any better Than when children we have joyously romped Down and deep in the August river Washing on the mountain tin. Now on the growing granite's precipitous face In our vigilant wassail Remember the children downstream playing Where your own little voices are speechless lingering Let it not be simply said that a river flows to flourish a land More than that he who is high at the source take heed: For a river putrid in the cradle is worse than the plunging flooding rain. And the eclectic monsoons may have come Have gathered and may have gone While the senses still within torrid membranes thap-pooo-ng thap-pong-ng-ng thap-pong (for "Glossary of Vernacular Terms" see next page)