Selections from Fire’s Goal: Poems from the Hindu Year
by Laurie Patton, Ph.D.

Editor’s Note : Mythic Journeys presenter Laurie Patton, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Early Indian Religions and Chair of the Department of Religion at Emory University in Atlanta. She spends a great deal of her time in India, and she has written numerous academic articles and books , such as Authority, Anxiety, and Canon: Essays in Vedic Interpretation; Myth as Argument: The Brhaddevata as Canonical Commentary; Jewels of Authority: Women and Text in the Hindu Tradition; Bringing the Gods to Mind: Mantra and Ritual in Early Indian Sacrifice; plus Myth and Method (ed., with Wendy Doniger) and The Indo-Aryan Controversy (ed., with Edwin Bryant). Her translation of the Bhagavad Gita is forthcoming, as is another book, Grandmother Language. Patton is also a poet, and here, with her permission, we share with you selections from her book of poetry, Fire’s Goal: Poems from the Hindu Year . We refer you to the book itself for diacritical marks indicating the appropriate pronunciation of those words which are transcriptions into English from the Sanskrit.

Purnima,
(Full Moon Sacrifice)

In this warming sky
you are fully white
needing white honor:
rice and boiled milk –
these are the ways

But the law
that white produces white
is not all there is
to your pull:

a cow’s eye
looks back at the dawn
and traces your disappearance
in the sweeps of her tail;
the cooking pot
states a sphere
between sharp flames;

these are not copies
but so many fragments
craving your whole

I must remind you
to gather them up again
in whiteness

(Patton notes about the following poem , “At this festival, in late monsoon August, snakes are honored with offerings; neighbors find local ponds and wells to bathe in, and make drawings on doorposts and thresholds. One legend has it that the famous grammarian Patanjali, is descended from a family of nagas, or snakes.”

Editor’s note : see Mythic Passages’ archived February issue for a version of this legend in Long Ago In India.)

Sravana, Naga Pancami
(Festival of Patanjali The Grammarian, Descended from the Snake)

This morning, you coil around
the last of sleep
hardly black, barely green
I cannot read you
Between the blades of kusa grass
Between the leaves of palm

all days this month
you swim up to the light
defying your home
you twist around a doorpost
lace between fingers
children squint to find you

but you will tell me
squinting is necessary;
reading is beyond
the slither of letters
that catch the eye
and curl the tongue

you will say
it is unruly motion
between water and light
that makes rows of verbs
and strings of phrases

you will show
that my algae of words
cannot gleam
until you swim between them
slippery and clarifying.

(Patton notes about the following poem , “ Diwali, usually October/November, is the festival of the triumph of light over darkness. At twilight in Diwali, small leaves containing lamps are floated down the river. If it floats safely downstream, the year will be happy. Gangotri is the town nearest the source of the Ganges River in the Himalayas.”)

Diwali at Gangotri

I want to remember
the flame floating down
in pure abstraction
oval, orange, heat
I want to recall
the mythical memory
of Bali crushed,
Rama in triumph,
encircling Sita

but instead this small fire
encased by leaf
presses forward
by the violence of torrents
so that it finds its own eddies

still small, it starts down
ten thousand feet
I blink as I imagine
how it might survive

no mythical memory here
just the sheerness of drop
and the chance that the victory
of light over darkness
is neither in memory
nor abstraction

but in that mother’s eye
as she climbs to her temple,
listens to the river
and glimpses the flame

in the flinch of the yogi
who breathes in the night
and sees the pale flash
between snow and bamboo

in the mistake by the child
who thinks it a shell
and reaches into the river
to hold the glow near

light over darkness
brings triumph of motion
perpetual distraction
and perceptual error

before its leaf
finally succumbs
to the waves

(Additional notes from the poet , regarding line 7, “ Diwali celebrates Visnu, in the form of a dwarf, defeats the demon Bali.” About line 9,” Diwali marks Rama rescuing his wife Sita and defeating the demon Ravana.” And about stanza 6, line 1, “in the flinch of the yogi,” she explains, “a traditional Hindu renunciant and forest – dweller who practices meditation.”)

Nityam Sesa: Visnu’s Cobra in the Woods

I want to touch
your scales, your hoods;
I am jealous
of the god
who sleeps on you
who belches out aeons
like so many yawns
before bed

you approximate infinity –
always in numerals,
and sometimes in feeling

but I also want
to touch those leaves –
the endless traces
of green behind you,
to gather all of them
in small fistfuls
and feel the measure
of my slow feet
padding the dirt
in prayers and circles

these measures
are infinity too,
but they will never
amount to a numeral:

they are instead
the endless counting
of your powers
in sweat and joy

(In Patton’s footnotes regarding this poem, she explains,” Visnu is said to recline on an ocean between the ages, protected by a snake whose spread hood hovers over his head. This snake, or sesa, is a symbol of infinity and endless power that the god possesses.” Editor’s note: For more about the story of Visnu see the February issue of Mythic Passages and Long Ago in India.)

For the Red-Throated Sparrow

When the branches rustled,
I was dreaming of Draupadi
singing as she bathed her hair
in Duhsana’s blood –
but you wake me with music;
and your red throat reminds me
as Draupadi did
that in some seasons
there is no difference
between beauty and wound.

(The poet explains , “ In the Hindu epic the Mahabharata, the heroine Draupadi is wife of the five Pandava brothers. She suffers public humiliation at the hands of Duhsana, one of the Kaurava brothers who are the Pandavas’ enemies. She swears that she will wash her hair in his blood out of revenge for the abasement she has suffered.”)

Found Poetry