Medicine mantra for the road

Khando Langri

i

again

we begin with that

under-tone of the universe;     (om)

that sound which renders

silence a parable         (do away with the)

pain of illness

the dust which rubs

the body raw, each speck

a tooth                         (unbodied).

ii.

go lightly         (like this)

to the frayed edges of place;  

unspool the map

picking

its threads        (apart)

for rope

Pola, in his later years            Mola, in her early years

           counts dirty rupees             holds chisel 

                       sacred beads              against rock, palms

            dried orange peels             against forehead

                 for the train ride           

              to the monastery.             while heavy braids swing

              trembling fingers

   teach pala the grammar                                          

of change: what separates

          the intentional from

               the unintentional,             in tune with flint,

     how action determines             earrings, spoon                   

      the inflection of verbs.             all lost in time (but not yet)

     the language of grief is

          one of shuffling feet             in this poem she returns:

          full body prostration         

 braced against the humid                                     

                   winds of karma            to the children with

                       lowered fists             twine wrapped waists

  the size of prayer wheels

          calloused hands ask            the black wool tent

                       foreign earth             too hot for Indian sun

                   to bear witness             to the flowers she plants

  sometimes – in dreams –

                             I see him;             in oil cans, that place where

              baring his tongue:           she makes beauty

                      a sign of piety            amidst the dust.

Khando Langri (she/her/མོ་) is a disabled Tibetan writer of mixed lineages born in Huntingdon (United Kingdom) and raised in Tio’tia:ke (Montreal, Canada). She recently completed a master’s degree in social anthropology at the University of Oxford where she wrote about landscape, orientation and archive within the Tibetan refugee road construction camps of the 1960s. Passionate about Tibetan land, life and textures, she loves writing about golden fish, mountains and grasslands.