Dragon is Home

Choekyi Lhamo ཆོས་ཀྱི་ ལྷ་མོ།

Apa is a dragon

my brother’s spirit animal

the supposed snake

ferocious and elegant.

But the dragon is weak

laying on the gurney

taking on the heat

to give more power

to his offspring.

Ama, a sheep

every form of naivete she dons

her daughter’s the cunning rat

forever more thirsty

for love.

The aging spirit of growing old

every year,

month,

days,

and

seconds.

Perhaps no land is ours

when no one claims their own.

Sometimes the hardened brown color

of a house

breaks my soul

Just one more time, we meet again

in sorrow,

in love.

This poem won the first position in the Shang Shung Institute’s (London Institution of Tibetan Studies) 2023-2024 International Poetry competition on the theme of ‘the year of the wood dragon.’

Choekyi Lhamo ཆོས་ཀྱི་ ལྷ་མོ། is a third-generation Tibetan born and brought up in India. She is currently a second-year journalism student at UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism pursuing narrative writing and investigative reporting as her primary focus. She is a former reporter at Phayul, one of the leading English news websites in the Tibetan diaspora in Dharamshala. She spent five years in New Delhi for her master’s and bachelor’s degrees in English Literature from Jawaharlal Nehru University and University of Delhi, respectively. Currently, she is the chair of South Asian Journalists Association’s Berkeley chapter. Her reporting interests lie in politics, culture, and diaspora issues.