Poverty
To see how
beautiful poverty is
you need to see
the Garo woman
walking along
the city street.
The crown of
feathers tucked among her hair,
the tattoos
that turn her body into a parrot,
the
many-coloured bangles that adorn her
from her wrists
to the shoulders
like the annual
rings of a wild teak ,
the stone necklaces dangling
from her neck
up to her waist
reminding you
of Goddess Lakshmi
in the
calendar-picture.
But in the
belly concealed by the loin cloth
in black and
red competing for glamour,
only an
unquenched fire.
The Garo Hills are part of the Garo-Khasi range in Meghalaya, india, inhabited by tribal dwellers who call themselves the A·chik Mande ("hill people"). Though their traditions were handed down orally, they once had a written language that was lost in a famine during their migration from Tibet (ca. 400 BCE); since it was written on cowhide, it was eaten.
ReplyDeleteLakshmi is the goddess of wealth, fortune, and prosperity. Her name is derived from the Sanskrit word for perceive, observe, know, and understand and the nouns goal, aim, objective. She is Vishnu's wife and shakti (energy). and the embodiment of all women. A hundred Lakshmis are born with a mortal body, but the evil ones are urged to leave and the good ones are welcomed. She emerged from Prajapati after his intense meditation on creation and the nature of being, and the other gods requested permission to kill her in order to acquire her powers, but he instructed then to ask her to give them gifts. She gave food to Agni (fire), kingly authority to Soma (the moon), imperial authority to Varuna (water; in some traditions he was the father of Brahma), priestly authority to Brihaspati (the planet Jupiter, the teacher of the gods, whose wife is Tara, the stars), martial energy to Mitra (the sun, god of energy, honesty, friendship, contracts, and meetings), force to Indra (god of the heavens, lightning, thunder, storms, rains, and river flows), dominion to Savitri (the divine influence or vivifying power of the sun), splendor to Pushan (another solar deity, responsible for marriages, journeys, roads, and the feeding of cattle), nourishment to Saraswati (the goddess of knowledge, music, art, wisdom, and learning), and forms to Tvashtri (the visible form of creativity, the heavenly builder, the maker of divine implements, the former of the bodies of men and animals, and the grandfather of the 1st humans).