Alone in the Temple

by Brett Rutherford

      The Emperor Li Yü,
           after the death of Empress Zhou

Lord Buddha, why?

Silence.

Incense rising,

a vertical line

no breeze disturbs.

It is as though the world

stopped breathing.

That there is no answer,

is an answer.

Lord Buddha, why?

Look everywhere

inside our realm.

Are not the finest

peaks surmounted

by your temples?

Have we not carved

you into cliffs, filled

grottoes with shrines?

Do we not have as many

monks as scholars?

As many Bodhisattva

figures as soldiers?

As many stupas

as bell and drum towers?

As many prayer wheels

as chariots?

Those who would topple the last

of Tang -- they do not know you.

We fight, but of all deaths

this one death I cannot

accept with calm resolve.

She is gone! Her shroud

is even now rolled up

and carried to the chamber.

I must watch as her ashes

rise to the heavens.

Have you not taught

there is no peace

until there is no will

to war? I have no will

to war. Love was my

barricade. It fell.

The people, in loving me,

loved you, What now,

Lord Buddha, what?

Who the illusion,

you, or I?

          (Written to follow Poem 21 of my Li Yu cycle)

As Idols Fall in the Afghan Hills

Time to get out of Afghanistan! Here's a slight revision of a poem I wrote before 9-11, on reading about the Taliban's destruction of a huge Buddha that had been carved into a mountainside. I had a vision of a carpet bombing of tiny Buddhas or Bodhisattvas (the spirits who undertake to return to linger in mortal life to do good deeds. Little did I suspect... Here's the poem:

What to do? What to do?
Mail a Mullah a thousand portraits
of Boddhisatvas.

Airdrop a hundred thousand Buddhas
on tiny parachutes onto the streets of Kabul.

Mate giant Japanese Buddhas with Godzilla,
send their offspring to the Afghan Hills
to sit serene in lotus pose

(but watch their fire-breath melt Taliban tanks
and send the soldiers shrieking!)

Skywrite LORD BUDDHA
from border to border in every known language.

Or wait for Karma to burn the burners,
shatter the shatterers, silence the mouths
of the speakers of law?
(No time, no time as the dynamite explodes
a Buddha head from fifteen hundred years ago.)

Let Allah, Buddha Christ and Brahma
rage like comets, moth fluttering
around the Man Sun.

One vanity makes them a greater vanity destroys them.
Yet a child with hands in clay, in the mud by the riverside
will make a new god with broad shoulders
far-seeing eyes, a forgiving visage,
a palm extended for the benediction
of unbearable Beauty, brief life
the only coin we can offer.

This parched land needs its memories,
its slender share of human fairness.
It needs a spark of hope
against the dark night
of goats and dynamite.