The Crescent God: A Hymn Badri Raina |
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Again I see you vividly, stationed
bare-skin, unperplexed, astride the furthest snows of mount Kailasa’s towering peak that holds aloft the canopy of twilight sky, your fearful trident brow bedecked by copper-crescent moon, divine Soma of ancient lore, immortal residue of Neptune’s fateful churning before the universe began. Your eyes, inward drunk perpetually at the blue ocean of your throat, swivel forever into the remote discotheque of your cosmic navel, except when consort Parvati her playful petal palms placed upon your lid, when to save the world from darkness your dreaded tertiary you revealed; or when your macho Rudra form combusted pitiful Kamadev in his preordained sacrifice, and over the prostrate Gaya and Apsmara, the wicked Asuras, you danced your resistless, all-ending Tandava. Coiled within the fiery fold of your lotus leg, and upon your restful drooping palm lie rolled a weighted universe and the awful energy of calm. From the centre of your pyramid head, stirless in trance, cascade the waters of Himavan’s boisterous offspring, the mighty Ganga, and dance through procreative night in vaulting bursts of concupiscent delight. Your blue-toned bust and half-roused serpent upon puissant arm, your tiger-skin charm, worn off the beast the churlish Rishis sent in cuckolded wrath to your intended harm, cause waves of holy lust, as when imbecile Daksha’s wilful daughter, Sati, after her fiery fate, took birth again as Ganga’s voluptuous sister, Parvati, who broke your ceaseless trance of aeons through devoted longing of a lifetime past, and wedded you afresh after the feast of horned and one-eyed man and beast that accompanied your notorious advance. Together you begot mightily the six-headed and twelve-armed scourge of demon, Taraka, war-like Karttikeya. That accomplished, you clasped your robust forms in unbroken embrace spanning a thousand epochs, and fused into one composite truth, the androgynous Ardhanari. Some say this was not the end, but that you two did contend in another protracted play whereby, in body’s declension, became for posterity primal Linga and Yoni, symbols of eternity, the pivot and periphery atonce of the revolving universe, holding this blue ball of generation spinning upon your tireless, one-legged dance. Nor is this all; for, prince of anti-thesis, clad in mantle of mortal ash, you are as well the lord of catastrophe. Conglomerate god of cosmic collage, Yours the Tandava, you the Nataraj. Truth of Truth, magnificent mirage, of all the Isvaras of Brahma’s manifest pantheon, you seem to our human sense least alien, for in your confluence of contraries you are, like earth-born men, beast and clown, yogi and glutton, giver and devourer all in one. O procreator par-excellence, custodian of man’s mortal dance, who will surpass the serene of your poppied trance, or the ecstasy of your power. God of purest paradox, in the very vortex of living joy we have knowledge of the dust and ash you wear, and prepare for the destined hour when with the slightest tremor of your lashes, borrowed bone you shall recover. O flesh beyond flesh, joy beyond sensible joy, god of profoundest alloy, while we seek for purposes forever in linear stance, the burden of your Dumaroo beat is plain and clear: All creation is zestful now, All creation is truthful never. |
thanks for posting my poem; you forgot to mention me as the author of t he hymn. kidnly rectify. the hymn is t he title poem of my first volume of poems, pulished by Writers Workshop, Calcutta in 1983. You will agree this is a serious lapse. badri raina
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