Kora

Tenzin Dickie

here’s how to make a woman strong

put your mouth on her temples

and blow

take a ball of tsampa, add jaggery

drop it on her tongue for long life

take a sacred thread around her wrist

for power and protection

sprinkle her eyes with blessed

water from Lake Rewalsar

she will be the memory of our house

the architect of our future

she will go on pilgrimage

and pray for us

the dead

Tenzin Dickie is a writer, translator, and editor. She is editor of Old Demons, New Deities: Twenty One Short Stories from Tibet (O/R Books, 2017) and The Penguin Book of Modern Tibetan Essays (Penguin India, 2023). Her writing has been anthologized in Modern English Poetry by Younger Indians published by the Indian Academy of Letters, Under the Blue Skies: A Tibetan Reader by Blackneck Books, and The Tibet Reader, forthcoming from Duke University Press. She is a former Fulbright fellow, and currently works as Communications Officer at Harvard Library, Harvard University.