The Good Terrorist by Doris Lessing

Just went through it – wasn’t convincing enough. Alice is the ‘little girl playing house’ – a squat in which leftist rebel types congregate. She is in love with this ruffian no-good Jason and is a phenomenally organised person. Transforms the squat into something liveable, cleans rooms filled with buckets of crap and manages somehow to get authority permissions for water and electricity…
What you can’t quite comprehend is how such a ‘mother’ figure can rail and rant against capitalism and its trappings. One moment she’s getting the carpenter to clean up the attic and the next she’s chucking a stone at daddy’s (now remarried – so obviously) bedroom window – or planting a bomb somewhere.
Couldn’t quite connect. If you were fond of playing house as a (girl) child you’d like to read bits and parts about our heroine going to various dumps and collecting things and setting up her home… Hmmm – why didn’t I think of it before buying that cane four-seater from that Assamese rip-off joint? Keep falling off it while watching Austin Powers anyway! More like Alice in Wonderland through Communist eyes.

Mad.woman.I.paint

Your skin

And shadows under the eyes

In brown

Deep dark strokes for the sides of your mouth

That once laughed

And now don’t smile

A lifetime

Of you

On canvas

Out of a paintbox

Goodbye

There comes a time
When you quit
The questioning
The waiting
The expectation
The hope
And surrender to the healing blue merged orange
Of a sunset

What was that again?

A fashion designer with nice long silken hair
Falling and curling about my shoulders
Like waves unsure of a direction
Talking creativity, showing it off in neon pinks
Ruffles
Bustier and very hot pants
Ecru
Lycra
Words in vogue
Everything’s in vogue
Nothing of what I actually feel
Or
Am.

Once again that familiar knock at the door

The reminder

the knock

soft and muffled

mortality

again reminds me

that i should not forget she lurks hidden in every dark nook i pass by

trying to grab at my shadow and make it hers

and i know we  have to be

only once

touched

by death’s sly handmaidens

to start tearing apart

 painful forlorn process of letting go

everything accumulated

gathered close to our hearts

severing

most painful of all

the ties

with our flesh and those who come of our flesh and from whose flesh we are created

but so frequent have your calls been

in this life

the strangest thing is my gentle reminder

i believe i care no more

it is not the giving up of a fight that counts now

it is the grateful embracing

of deep deep sleep

and peaceful rest

the finality

of a full stop.

Your daughter

 

Her father sent me her photograph today

her eyes are yours

mischief, laughter, coal, shooting off specks of fire

there she is  with her chocolate smeared smile

hands folded stubbornly across her chest

lips a  line, trying hard not to curve in a smile

you and I still friends,

though you are gone

the emotion remains

the yearning in my heart for her

i feel you share it too

in your silence

invisibility

for her

so far away

both of us

you not there, I

childless

accursed mother’s heart

unable to reach out and hold

our motherless little girl

brush away that strand of hair

falling into her eyes

Bodhisattva in the basement

Maitreya

you happy, rounded dream of prosperity,

Friend

Bodhisattva

enlightened elevated soul

created by man from plaster of Paris

Vended at red-light crossings

where people, buses, trucks and rickshaws

meet in a cloud of cacophony

and through that haze you smile and smile and smile

your hands thrown up – sheer bliss

holding a gold ingot

which we covet

want to bring home to ferret away in secret places

Bodhisattva

today I saw you in the basement

That dark cavernous emptiness of rejects

lit on and off by

numbing light beams of cars

and the red and yellow blinking of departing tail lights

Garbage, leftover paper, plastics

find a home here

and swirling strands of dust

at times peek in curiously

at you

Lord of Wealth

Prosperity

Round of belly

your smile

Maitreya

Bodhisattva of happiness

Who put you here

among things thrown away unwanted useless

rejects

A part of you broken – just a little

The glitter they had put on you to make you attractive to the motorists passing by

at the traffic signal still not worn off

And as you had then

laughed your bellyfull of laughs

through the fumes of petrol and diesel

haze of passing vehicles thousands

you still remain standing among the rejects

the god of prosperity and happiness

rejected yourself

laughing, laughing… still laughing

homeless pariah

sometimes

dancing

with joy

i wish you well but i wish you were free

 

The bride Her feet So painted red the toenails And toes and heels and all of her feet Lined with red Of departure To her husband’s home Cutting off blood ties With her father mother sister Forming new bonds Followed by a babe Bonded to her with a bloody umbilical cord To be cut again And again Like ties we form And watch unravel… And I watch her the bride Smile innocently Happy to be where she is In the moment Not far away in time like I am And I hope with her this happiness remains Like the fresh betel leaf She steps on…as part of a ritual that teaches her, each leaf symbolising a world…  of motherhood, of that of a wife and daughter in law …that she has to learn to balance In her hennaed hands And in that beauty of the moment I wish she would step off the last one … that betel leaf which ties her to domesticity responsibility rudely bids her forget youth ebullience… And find vairagya… her freedom and her soul…

The universe that existed within me

When you touched me

I came alive

When you touched me

I was the sparkle

Of a million stars

And the fantastic light tripping

Off the bright mirror surfaces of all the lakes

In this universe

I whirled like the planets

My delighted heart

throbbed with the songs

trilled by a thousand songbirds

I inhaled the incense offered to gods in all the temples of the world

the joy every mother feels

gazing at her her child

was mine.

without you

the world just seems bereft of all the rays of light

and every shard of glass shattered on this earth

cannot equal the pieces of my heart

what’s this emotion that so overwhelms me?

how I’ve wondered

At this entire universe of joy and sorrow encompassed in my small frame

If this is the vastness, the grandeur of love

I am humbled to have given it a home in my heart

Well contrasted

 

Darkness sits well on me

pleases me Pigmentation

does not interfere with my breathing

or peace of mind

when my fingers wind around yours

we contrast so pleasingly

My colours could absorb the reflections of your whiteness

and when it’s night

I feel an affinity with its velvetness