This Incendiary Season

Kathleen Willard undertakes the ultimate road trip—a one-month exploration and encounter of the entire subcontinent of India. Willard instantly and utterly fell in love with the people, culture, arts and literature of India and returned home forever changed. Each day, out of sorts, she encountered both the beauty and the poverty, the ecstatic and the solemn and her poems document her transformation and uncertainty. Her journey shadowed by her mother’s terminal illness and her insistence, Willard make this journey despite her decline.

Saint’s Day Bazaar

Unsure if I have the temperament
to travel to India while my mother falters, I read advisories
and newspapers report terrorist 
unrest of the Tamil Tigers erupts in border towns. Malaria pills taken,
guide and history books read. I make a passing acquaintance with an epic-
Himalayan born Rama journeys to Sri Lanka to rescue

Sita, his chaste wife from immolation. My whole perspective askew.
I expect (and find) oppressive poverty, trash, humid temperatures.
Can I survive the assault of hunger and need and unknowing, be able to pack
and travel to the next destination intact, unscathed? Advise,
Oh goddess of travel. (St. Christopher, protect me.) I fake
awe at the Chola bronzes in the Madras Museum, where to find the best

bargains in rugs, sapphire rings, silk saris, thinking only of the oppressed
starving entire country many moving stones for skyscrapers a few
bricks at a time balanced in baskets on their heads.  Will the woman and children crack
into a million pieces under the tonnage their bodies support? Sadhus contemplate
their next life, diapered in dhotis, they see
the futility of our choices, the materiality we seek.

Legless beggars navigate Delhi on rolling wood boards, no tricks,
all this out in the open, on the streets. I dodged fish escaping market baskets
as cobras dance out of cloth bags to flutes. Shopkeepers brew chai tea
sit crossed legged waiting for customers to
enter their shops, their brown eyes liquid, seductive, fresh from the temple
of Lakshmi incense curlicues before her shop shrine. In any instant, my heartbreaks.

I enter a mosque, kick off my shoes, no temple socks, quick, a boy takes
my hand abrupt and culls me. I am barefoot, step in red spit
and dog shit and a whereareyoufrom America I will guide you, my temper
flares come to my family’s booth, here bones of the Sufi saint rest
in the marble tomb-ShiekhSalamChirsthi. I try to shoo
my guide away, his grasp tightens, his rant continues, I cannot flee

the crush of pilgrims on this Sufi saint’s day bazaar engulfs me
Who blesses childless couples his voice insistent, in my face.
Jostled, I falter, almost faint, await rescue. What can a single person do?
There is no escape. The mosque gate receded, the boy throws a fit.
This way this way. He persists
berates me to buy some trinket, tugs me towards his tent.

 And I turn into stone, his epic rage joins my subcontinent,
his desperation a souvenir I resist, and take, and outside 
temple beggars, a wall of hands,

                          which one, which one, do I hand these few rupees to?