Refuge

Tenzin Dickie

I look for the

Translational starting point

No longer remembering where I start

Does death come before or after life?

Or during

For us, this is a question

How can we carry the weight of evidence? Carefully

One step forward, two steps back, three steps forward

That’s our heroic arc

I take shelter in our songs

I take refuge in our stories

What I owe my people is what we owe anyone we love

Everything

I don’t want to tell

I want to listen

A poem is a question you haven’t been asked

Sometimes I too can answer this question

My responsibility—is it only to this poem?

No, it is also to you

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.