Dr Bānīrā Giri is a Nepali poet, author and scholar. She has published three volumes of poetry and two novels: The Prison and Unbound. Giri was the first woman to be awarded a PhD by Tribhuvan University for her thesis on the poetry of opalprasad Rimal. She teaches at Padma Kanya Campus, a women’s college in Kathmandu and participates regularly in literary conferences in Nepal and internationally. Her work has been translated into English and Hindi.
Snatch me up like an eagle
swooping down on a chicken,
wash me away like a flood destroying the fields,
fling me from the door
like my daughter carelessly sweeping out dirt.
In infinite wilds I lead
a solitary life.
just a naming ceremony,
set aside, forgotten;
even in the Rāmāyaṇa, Lakshman.’s line
had first to be drawn
before Sītā could cross it.1
Time, you are always the winner,
I bent my knee before you
like Bārbarik faced by compulsion,2
like King Yāyati faced by old age,3
I fell prostrate like grandfather Bhīshma
before the arrows from your arms.4
Touch my defeated existence just once
with your hands of ironwood;
how numb I am,
how hard to grasp, how lifeless
in the presence of your strength and power.
You spread out forever like the seas,
I rippled like the foaming waves,
you blazed up fiercely like a volcano,
I smouldered, slow as a forest fire.
You are power, wholly embodied,
ready to drink even poison,
we follow – my fellows and I at a party,
we descend on a wheel of birth and death,
bearing bags full of gifts,
gifts of alcohol and oxygen,
blood and cancer,
tumors and polio.
My grandson will be born
with sleeping pill in his eyes,
his potency already dead,
needing no vasectomy.
Perhaps he will be born as a war,
embracing every cripple,
perhaps he will be born as a void,
to replace the meaningless babble
of revolt, lack of faith, and being.
Perhaps he will even refuse to be born
from a natural mother’s womb;
Time, you are always the winner:
revealed like a crazy Bhairava,5
keep burning like the sun,
keep flowing like a river,
keep rustling like the bamboo leaves.
Upon your victory,
I will let loose the calves from the tethering post,
fling open the doors of grain stores and barns,
hand over my jewels to my daughter-in-law,
and lay out green dung, neatly,
around the tulsī shrine.6
So snatch me up like an eagle
swooping down on a chicken,
wash me away like a flood destroying the fields,
and, like my daughter carelessly sweeping out dirt,
sweep me from the threshold with a single stroke,
sweep me from the threshold with a single stroke.
1 This is a reference to an event in the Rāmāyaṇa epic.
2 Bārbarik is mentioned in Hindu scriptures such as the Skanda Purāṇa. He lived his whole life under a curse, inherited from a previous life, that he would be killed by Vishṇu. He was therefore compelled to worship various deities to preserve his life (Vettam Mani 1975, 107).
3 Different versions of the story of King Yāyati are told in the Padma Purāṇa and the Vishṇu Purāṇa. Both, however, agree that his amorous disposition and infidelity to his first wife brought upon him the curse of eternal old age and infirmity from his father-in-law. Dowson [1879] 1968, 376.
4 In the Mahābhārata wars, Bhīshma took the side of the Kauravas on the condition that he should not be called upon to fight against the warrior Arjuṇ. Goaded on by another warrior, however, Bhīshma attacked Arjuṇ and wa pierced by innumerable arrows. When he fell, mortally wounded, from his chariot, the arrows that filled his body held him above the ground. Dowson [1879] 1968, 52–53.
5 The Bhairava is a fearsome emanation of the god Shiva who figures prominently in the religious iconography of the Kathmandu Valley.
6 The tulsī, or sacred basil tree, is often grown in special shrines in front of Hindu homes or in domestic courtyards.