Medicine mantra for the road

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

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.