This is an older poem about the burning ghat in Varanasi (Benares), India. The picture above is by Diana Barco, from a book of my poetry called Going on Somewhere. I am posting it for dVerse Poets Pub open link night as well as the Poetry Palace Poets Rally and for Victoria C. Slotto’s blog, liv2write2day (for a prompt about memory.) All are great resources for poets and those who love poetry.
After it’s fallen
In Benares, the tenders rake the fallen feet back into the flames.
The first time we watched them, I was horrified.
How you would know that foot, I kept thinking,
your father’s soft purply big-veined foot.
My father’s feet have always seemed too small to me.
When he walks he seems to go on edge, as if they
can hardly carry him.
The toes of his shoes turn up strangely,
even after he’s had them just one week,
Something from the war, he’s always said.
In Benares, the feet are the last parts to be burned.
They overhang the pyre and simply
wait there, smoking slowly
until the shins are completely charred.
Their full flesh too heavy for the burned legs,
they fall, eventually, to the ground.
They never fall together, but one first, pointing randomly,
the other still flexed in the air.
When one of the tenders notices, he
pushes the fallen foot back into the flames.
He uses two long poles, the
green bamboos of the bier.
Sometimes he has to lever the foot
to reach the flames again, crossing the poles
like huge chopsticks.
They have dark feet in Benares,
darker than my father’s would be,
smooth and brown.
I couldn’t stop looking at them, thinking how you would know
that foot on the ground there, that foot.
ManicDDaily 
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