This Hardened Land
Carolyn Enid Sadowska
I pit my bones against this hardened land
Where the spotted leopard ghosts the slopes
And in the shade of rock and shale
Steals along the unfolding edges
I want to run wild with this beast
Leap icy waterfalls
Risk slips off narrow ledges
High on strong mountain honey
Leaving
Carolyn Enid Sadowska
This morning feels too cold to step outside
Yet children scamper barefoot beneath my window,
I dress and pick my way uphill toward an ancient temple.
Chanted dirges rumble softly up behind me.
I press through waves of villagers heading down.
They come from stone houses above;
Making their way to a courtyard by the river.
As always after death
A departing soul needs help
To go where a spirit must go and stay forever.
Later, from the temple steps, I peer down.
Drummers, small against the land,
Parade a draped bundle across the river
And far out along the sloping fields.
I depart that day;
the village women still chanting
And on a hill well beyond the town,
I pass the spirit guides edging their charge
Further and further into another world.
Connection
Carolyn Enid Sadowska
It’s a long trek – the Jiri trail up to Khumbu
Each day we climb wrapped in dense mist
A blindfold of drizzle, a festive ball of roiling fog
Connective tissue binding us tight to the land underfoot
BEAUTY
Carolyn Enid Sadowska
Tell me we don’t need it at summer’s end
Tell me again and again tell me again
Then cart away the debris my love we don’t need it any more
Or have I wrapped you in regrets and you drift past
Asleep in the morning sun me masked at summer’s end
Blindly drifting asleep exposed drifting past
Exposed drifting beneath the arch and you
Tell me again and again tell me again
Why do you say it collapsed my love under the arch
As if it were true as the cart and the morning sun drifted
Tell me again and again tell me again why
Was it blindly wrapped in debris we don’t need any more
Or drifting at summer’s end why?
Why do you tell me again and again as if it were true
I have wrapped you in regrets and you drift past
Asleep in the morning sun me masked at summer’s end
Tell me again and again tell me again
His Life
Carolyn Enid Sadowska
I often go back to that train ride across India;
Ancient unwashed cars, iron bars on every window,
backpack padlocked under my seat.
At night I wake as we pull into noisy stations,
buy cups of hot milk meted out of a bucket
less caring about health than hungry for warmth.
At daytime stops vendors move quickly down the aisles hawking food
but at one station close to Delhi, a small bony boy jumps on,
pulls off his rag-for-a-shirt and uses it to dry-wash the floor at my feet…
his hand soon stretches out for money.
I can’t recall how I responded.
Now, years later
I still see his imploring face
and wonder if he lives.
Snapshot at Twilight
Carolyn Enid Sadowska
Stranger to herself, body and soul
my aged mother spirals into decline.
My proud and pretty parent slips through the rabbit hole,
her memories elusive and confused; straining her patience.
Times and places shift and sway.
Daily outings never happened.
And every time they are mentioned,
tomorrow’s plans are a big surprise.
She forgets her closet full of clothes;
week after week, wearing the same black jacket,
ripped on one side, food-stained blemishes on both
…fretting she should wear a brooch to dress it up.
Like a cat, she sleeps all day.
At night she prowls the building, hungry for action.
I find her alone on the other side of an empty gym,
motionless on her walker, staring up at the treadmill.
The Corn Goddess
Carolyn Enid Sadowska
Each day, about noon, she sashays along the beach.
Across her shoulders, pole and pails sway with her gait;
the moving Goddess makes her way down the sandy crescent.
In the shade of a palm, she stops, squats,
sets down her pot of fire, cooks and sells grilled cobs of corn.
We creamy white pilgrims perched on a foreign beach,
rise Lazarus-like from our towels and hammocks;
tourist-zombies, jingling our coins,
enlivened by the aroma of lime and butter.
We are here only to eat and sleep, lie in the sun
and recover from bad weather… or God knows what malaise…
Here to be healed by grilled corn
Here to be massaged back to life by moments like this…
Nibbling our way back to somewhere, kernel by kernel.
Follow Your Nose
Carolyn Enid Sadowska
Best of all was the peaty smell of whiskey
on my daddy’s breath.
It was like being at a party.
But second best in my childhood years
were the short days and cold nights of winter
when my parents hosted the real thing.
Left to seek out my own pleasures,
In the half light of their room
my young hands secretly fondled
fur coats piled onto the bed.
My lips, my cheeks caressed satin linings…
and I inhaled to bursting the tweedy perfumed air
lingering on men’s greatcoats.
Or perhaps summertime was second best…
Dawdling down the street
my head swivelling 180 degrees,
tracking the passing cumulous-cloud
of an over-scented shopper.
I loved to follow my nose.
My nose had adventures.
Years later my nose
led me to an Omani hilltop village.
Sitting with women in their quarters
eating peeled oranges and nuts
we laughed and bonded.
They poured rose water over my head
and I left, proudly smelling like a village woman.
The Knoll
Carolyn Enid Sadowska
Steps below this hill’s greatest height
more up than down
I stretch upon an eminence of earth.
Solitude lures me to these bird lands
amongst grasses and mosses;
flowers so preciously tiny
my old eyes strain to see them.
A thousand years from now
I will still be here
wishing to see the flowers.
But for now, the knoll has my back
…and I linger…
part of the endless sky.
Temptation
Carolyn Enid Sadowska
On desert sand I sleep deeply beneath shooting stars piercing earth’s shield;
each entry changing the world forever. This in my sleeping, I don’t yet know.
Camels tethered nearby gurgle with excitement, sniffing the scent of wild females and dripping saliva. Out of their mouths slip silky sacs as big as balloons.
I am bewitched by the desert’s dry air. It fills me with temptation, makes me spur my beast into a gallop across the sand, every part of him and me flailing about.
Racing into the emptiness, scorching sun at my back, I merge with the rippling wind.
Racing into the emptiness, I breathe in the vastness, I breath out the vastness.
This in my sleeping, I don’t yet know: I surrender to sleep deeply below the earth’s shield.
On desert sand, the wind changes the world forever.
Translations by Devendra Tiwari