To Mountain Deity

Tsering Wangmo Dhompa

Every morning I boil tea leaves, I take nine steps, twenty

some days, if you count the retreating steps back

to the kitchen. Something is often left behind, even when

I offer libations to the deities at my altar. It’s the process

that counts when we write, I tell my students. I don’t tell them

I don’t like talking about process. I practice still this language

and now what? I can’t even write to my cousins who are in Tibet.

Years of practice so they could approve, so they can say, She writes

like us. I’m not sure what I was thinking when I began to write

except to bridge the distance. Homecoming. But this language

is a kind of loss because she still cannot read this poem.

And I have to prove there is home on both ends of this bridge

I am building. When I drink my morning tea, I am often thinking

about what comes after. I practice a ghost self as a form of hope

to imagine a future. My cousin prays for me to the protector deity

whose law we abide. The wolf-deity is protecting you, she says.

We’ve never put our faith in the state. We speak in the dialect.

I call on the wolf as the meeting starts about how we should

form a steering committee for the committees we will need.

How do we vet new members, someone asks? I could have done a kora

around the mountain deity in the time they solicit consent for our consent.

Maybe this is democracy, maybe revolutions take a circular path.

Not all of a sudden but through the process of stirring, of simmering,

one consent at a time. How do I prove I am committed? I am here,

even as the deity, the mountain, is there. And what do they know

of us to measure my commitment?  I’ve no patience to practice

this kind of love that asks to be vetted when they have not asked

why my sentences are bloodied, why they do not know your name.

Tsering Wangmo Dhompa is Associate Professor at Villanova University. Her parents fled Tibet in 1959. Raised by her mother in Tibetan communities in Dharamsala, India, and Kathmandu, Nepal, Dhompa earned a BA and an MA from Lady Shri Ram College in New Delhi, an MA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and an MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University. She is the author of the poetry chapbooks In Writing the Names (2000) and Recurring Gestures (2000). She has published the full-length poetry collections Rules of the House (2002), In the Absent Everyday (2005), and My Rice Tastes Like the Lake (2011), which was a finalist for the Northern California Independent Bookseller’s Book of the Year Award for 2012. She is also the author of Revolute (2021). Dhompa’s non-fiction book based on her life is called A Home in Tibet (Penguin India, 2013), published in the United States as Coming Home to Tibet: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Belonging (2016). Her latest book The Politics of Sorrow is forthcoming from Columbia University Press in 2025.