A yet-unpublished poem by Prartho
We called it Dengue Fever
anytime we were struck down
with aches and the shivers and
no hunger for anything but
a small cup of ashram soup, and
I was lucky enough to have found
the English-language bookstore
on Mahatma Gandhi Road
where Walt Whitman and Rainer
Maria Rilke hung out in paperback,
so it was the poets who sat with me
in my bamboo hut, and ferried me
through fever dreams, taught me
to sing the song of myself, initiated
me into the terror of angels.
Forty years later I pour myself
again into the heart of the hermit
crying out from the Duino cliffs—
I am listening back to the poets
and their angels: Truth is beauty
and beauty is terrible, they sing.
We know this by now, don’t we?
Every angel is gorgeous & dreadful.
But we’ve learned to say yes to those
envoys of fever or fear or whatever
malady draws near. And we nod
to the wrinkly old homeopath who fiercely
proclaims: Don’t trust a body that never
falls ill. We need to sink back, every now
& then, back to the softness
of how we began.
Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash
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