Leila Farjami - Buddha's dilemma

Tree trunks fall and you don't care,
jungles burn and you don't care.
Your mother parts,
and you entrust the sweetness of her bosoms to the midnight of a steamy alley
where it’s full of the sound of plunging fetuses
in your infinite city.
Your father dies and you shove his comb,
full of white hair,
into your back pocket
as you bury his yellow dentures in the lacerated gums of earth
while you whistle, we sing, you whistle, we kiss,
we don't care.

We don't care
why the occulted Imam who vowed to return
will never re-emerge
at the time of children burning in their classrooms,
with rulers, notebooks, blackboards, and erasers,
at the time of sacrificial wooden humans circling the squares
and getting charred into coal.

No, the Imam will never reappear…

We don't care if we never again swallow cherry pits
while we stand up under a lukewarm rain,
making love like two dark apparitions,
before I become imbued with embryos

knowing you as their father.
No, we don't care.

We will never become human
so, let's at least become decent lice
like the ones adorning an orphaned girl's hair
in Mazar-i-Sharif
who will soon neither have a comb nor fingers.

Let's become decent lice…

This is Buddha's dilemma:
where would you hold your God
when you've got a weapon inside?

Leila Farjami

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/buddha-s-dilemma/