}} FINDING THE WAY by Mamang Dai |

Poetry at Sangam

SangamHouse

 










FINDING THE WAY by Mamang Dai

Purgatorio 

We ate the words. We were hungry.
We ate the words. [1]

In the cave of our ancestors
we drank the wine of ritual,
sprinkled blood on the ground.
Who knows if it rained or snowed -,
entangled in a myth
finding the way was hard
when we swallowed the sunrise and the sunset.

All the words were eaten.
What were the words, what was written?

In a dream the great hunter made a speech.
Come, he said, let us leave this torment of darkness
water and mist,
and sing for the river flowing east.
Undying on the wild way we followed
carrying the wind and waters,
the flying sky,
and the stag on the horizon
dancing among the stars.

Tomorrow –
would we reach tomorrow?

From the cave of our ancestors
the void continues to fill.
The letters of earth and sky
written in the outline of the hills:
a sun seed in the backbone,
the tenacity of grass;
root strength
and the fragrance of fleeting things,
the purpose of growing corn
and living mud
feeding breath with fire and bones
in the silence of our hills, the fury of our skies.

 

 

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[1] This is a reference to the lack of a writing system for the majority of tribes of Arunachal Pradesh. A large chunk of the customs and beliefs comes to us via the oral tradition with stories to explain the disappearance of a script that was written on animal skin.  There is the story of an old man who possessed the history of his tribe written on deerskin but this got burnt and he ate it. In another version a deer that lived in the mountains saw the sons of a legendary ancestor writing the history of the world on a piece of liver. The deer approached them with an offer that men could write on his skin and he would give them back the letters whenever they needed them. However, during a hunt the men accidentally killed the deer and ate it.

 

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