Arun Kolatkar
A game of tigers and sheep
Who has the tigers and who the sheep
never seems to make any difference.
The result is always the same:
She wins,
I lose.
But sometimes when her tigers
are on the rampage,
and I've lost half my herd of sheep,
help comes from unexpected quarters:
Above.
The Rusty Shield Bearer,
neutral till then,
para-drops a winning flower —
yellow
and irrelevant —
on the checkerboard
drawn on the pavement in charcoal,
cutting off the retreat
of one tiger,
and giving a check to the other;
and quickly follows it up
with another flower —
just as yellow
and just as irrelevant — except
that it comes down even more slowly;
a flower without a search warrant
that brushes past her earlobe,
grazes her cheek,
and disappears down the front
of her low-cut blouse —
where she usually keeps
her stash of hash —
to confuse her even further, with its mildly
narcotic
but very distracting fragrance.
Arun Kolatkar
An Old Woman
An old woman grabs hold of your sleeve and tags along.
She wants a fifty paise coin.
She says she will take you to the horseshoe shrine.
You've seen it already.
She hobbles along anyway and tightens her grip on your shirt.
She won't let you go.
You know how old women are.
They stick to you like a burr.
You turn around and face her with an air of finality.
You want to end the farce.
When you hear her say,
‘What else can an old woman do on hills as wretched as these?'
You look right at the sky.
Clear through the bullet holes she has for her eyes.
And as you look on the cracks that begin around her eyes spread beyond her skin.
And the hills crack.
And the temples crack.
And the sky falls
with a plateglass clatter around the shatter proof crone who stands alone.
And you are reduced to so much small change in her hand.
Arun Kolatkar
Chaitanya 1
Sweet as grapes are the stone of
Who has the tigers and who the sheep
never seems to make any difference.
The result is always the same:
She wins,
I lose.
But sometimes when her tigers
are on the rampage,
and I've lost half my herd of sheep,
help comes from unexpected quarters:
Above.
The Rusty Shield Bearer,
neutral till then,
para-drops a winning flower —
yellow
and irrelevant —
on the checkerboard
drawn on the pavement in charcoal,
cutting off the retreat
of one tiger,
and giving a check to the other;
and quickly follows it up
with another flower —
just as yellow
and just as irrelevant — except
that it comes down even more slowly;
a flower without a search warrant
that brushes past her earlobe,
grazes her cheek,
and disappears down the front
of her low-cut blouse —
where she usually keeps
her stash of hash —
to confuse her even further, with its mildly
narcotic
but very distracting fragrance.
Arun Kolatkar
An Old Woman
An old woman grabs hold of your sleeve and tags along.
She wants a fifty paise coin.
She says she will take you to the horseshoe shrine.
You've seen it already.
She hobbles along anyway and tightens her grip on your shirt.
She won't let you go.
You know how old women are.
They stick to you like a burr.
You turn around and face her with an air of finality.
You want to end the farce.
When you hear her say,
‘What else can an old woman do on hills as wretched as these?'
You look right at the sky.
Clear through the bullet holes she has for her eyes.
And as you look on the cracks that begin around her eyes spread beyond her skin.
And the hills crack.
And the temples crack.
And the sky falls
with a plateglass clatter around the shatter proof crone who stands alone.
And you are reduced to so much small change in her hand.
Arun Kolatkar
Chaitanya 1
Sweet as grapes are the stone of