How dare you make me cackle
like a slavering jackal
at pied lizard shells so delicate
the pious air would scarcely breathe at them?

How dare you make me jabber
like some lost madwoman
in foetid streets so crusted
the tread of them is stale as buffalo scour?

And you have made me rage...
a titless old tigress!
While we stood crushed by pilgrims
and gold-leafed the breasts of our goddesses,

you sneered and pointed to their paths,
not only strewn with bruised and shredded petals,
but heaped with steaming piles
of pungent dung.

I have spied on you at the river!
I have seen how decent women scoop their cleansing baths:
how the golden water pools, then drips
sadly between their tapered fingers.

I have watched you cup ungentle hands
and hold the clear brown of it in creased palms
so that not one drop of topaz escapes
between the curving digits of your greed.

This is how you stoop to hold
each clean-cut water-stone between your artful hands.
You turn and offer it unscarred
to startled and thirsty crowds on their heat-bleached steps.

How dare you make them shriek and heckle
and riot at you across that moon-strewn pond?
You laugh your bitter practiced laugh and shrug.
'I expected it'- you taunt those distant marble domes.

You swathe your hardened frame in bandages of silk-
sweet apricot, sour persimmon, like monsoon-smoke.
You scuff pariah dust under calloused heels.
'Of course I dare'- you trill, like some careless girl.

'I am deva, I am demon, I am dervish',
you chant, dizzying in folds of twilit-trance.
'Perhaps I am forever-damned, but of course I dare!
I am your poet.'