Memsahib - from "How to Make a Dress Out of Silence"

This poem is from my collection of 45 recent poems, "How to Make a Dress out of Silence"
Memsahib  

There are five lakes, three farms, a railway track,

blue hills far away and torn banana leaves

down in the valley where Mohammed lives:

my gentle gardener, a silent man;

each day he brings me hibiscus, sweeps the dust

from garden paths, meticulous and calm.


I sit there on my rooftop, alone and calm.

I paint my canvases: the tracks;

purple lotus; lakes that dry to dust;

women with bellied water jars; the leaves

are rafts of green. The little lives

planting, winnowing, hoeing; the men


who wade behind their ploughs; lives

entirely circumscribed. I paint the calm

pale buffalo. On my canvas tiny men

harness the seasons in the track

of monsoon and drought. Typhoons leave

annual destruction in the dust.


I am an alien in this land of flood and dust.

I cannot grasp the nuances of lives

more fragile than the ripped banana leaves.

From the garden Mohammed, strong and calm,

brings flowers for my table. Streaming down the tracks,

beggars, women, ragged journeymen.


The alien's a wanderer: she must go with her man:

tomorrow they will leave the dirt and dust,

the rounded hills, the crowded railway tracks,

return to the complex city’s busy life,

leave the calm she’s found here, deceptive calm.

She packs and cries the night before they leave.


He comes to the echoing house before they leave,

brings her hibiscus red as menstrual blood, a man

proud, his brown eyes warm, no longer calm,

his hands and feet clothed in the fertile dust

so that I caught my breath, almost forgot our lives

must always run along two different tracks.


The moment hung between them like the dust

until they stepped away, back into their real lives:

she Memsahib, he Mohammed from the poor side of the tracks.

© Janice Windle 2012