A Shared Fire: Elegy

Friday, July 14, 2006

For Amelia Rokotuivuna


I: Cremation
Rain did not grieve instead indelibly danced with fire
Hymns a choir on jisu sits on warm shloka’s shoulder
Friends amble around hillock whipped by sea zephyr
Questions asked on choice of fire and pyre of wood
Shared cremation with a law clerk a good solid man
Swift recognition of smiling portrait on eulogy book
Tap of rain ciphers one reason among many on willed
Choice, now it takes the form of an enigma via a caret
Formless about truth unlike your convictions and words
Insert for air and ash a final tirade against trampling
Of the earth by many who mistake conviction for truth,
Hypocrisy for honesty, taxi driver asks if it was high birth,
Marked by the lighting of camphor and incense, sugar
All agreed that choice made for one not the other
Is also a final shaking of that venerable fist to share
A fire, to write on walls, truth and to fight with chalk
Final stand on pedestal of dried mangrove wood. Afire

II: Wake
The space was never going to be big enough
Even walls and floors broken down of the Y
Burst to the seams with mourners celebrating
Red wine the blood of choice runs deep now
Words turn surely into tears a coughed laugh
Music and songs compete for your ears afar
Watching from sheets on rafters of gray air
The program for wake written by memories
Of friends honest with words of a maverick
A woman ahead of time of place unafraid
Unlike the rest of us content to stare to wish
For steady gaze and hard spine to fight with.

III: Crematory
Purgatory this place of burning hellfire of snake eyed embers
Staked to earth fire burns fanned by sea breeze from Nukulau
Headlights sweep uncertainly along corrugated walls to light
A leftover hymn sung by the singeing flames earth ash bones
Each is one and the other a shared vacuity of forms take flight
Long poles rakes distills wood on a hot dry furnace of stones
Red wine blasphemously poured in a glass rests on a car hood
A woman of fire had no aversion to hammering such an anvil
Shaped minds bent wills doused venom of untruth lips in still
Of charcoal minted water, she is here, in the wind, undying fire

The embers, and in the morning in the ash, light in blank mire.


Mohit Prasad

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