Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu

jp

My heart wanders through incomparable contrasts,

my image of my international world

as seen from the windows of a moving vehicle,

a charity organization’s four wheel drive truck,

and my image of the world when on foot among rice paddy or in forest,

Confusing me.

Why the delirium in the head of a rational man

Bent on eradicating poverty,

Where humanity can be reduced

To the ideology of strategic plans,

Objectives, Actions, Goals,

Project success in typed reports,

Faith manifest in the idolatry of statistics?

In a vehicle  I am infected with an urgency,

Traveling between those villages the truck takes me to and from

To be compassionate, to understand, to know

And to wipe problems away with solutions.

On foot inspecting the rice variety sown in the paddy,

Looking up to calculate the yield of firewood in the trees,

I lose sight of graphs, policies, and analyses;

I hear the wind and become lightheaded.

Because I can see the people on the dry lands of Tamil Nadu,

one thousand years from now,

as they were before,

as they may always have been:

there are different trees,

though maybe more than now,

rice,

always rice,

and different homes,

but simple as they are now;

in essence all remains the same

in that wasteland my world could never find use for.

Do I hear a woman weep from loss?

Yes.

And I see a man bend painfully under the weight of a load of stones.

Then, scintillating in the arid breeze,

I hear children's laughter,

I see them play,

and if I listen carefully, yes,

I hear women, too, in laughter at a well, gossiping,

and men mumbling in hushed, low tones,

sitting together beneath a tree while their buffalo graze.

Because my income depends on projects,

traveling to where the donors pay,

I have only once been to Tamil Nadu;

With God’s grace

when one day all this madness of my world is done,

I will be again in one thousand years.