Chinnamastā (Speaks) by Manash Bhattacharjee
Chinnamastā[1] (Speaks)
To Arundhati Ghosh
When I am all body,
Desire, dark serpent,
Bathes in my blood,
Shoots up my spine
Bangs on my skull,
Asking for a release,
I can’t grant its plea
Without an offering,
How shall I do away
With my mad rumble,
It splits me into two:
Am I my own fruit?
The serpent blinds — -
I lose every direction
I loathe what I crave
All this — -undoes me,
I — -no longer a head,
I, a cosmos of blood,
I, a mother of beasts
I offer myself like this:
Over my own coitus
I am headless spring.
(Manash Bhattacharjee’s first collection of poetry, Ghalib’s Tomb and Other Poems (2013), was published by The London Magazine.)
[1] Chinnamastā (“she whose head is severed”) is a Tantric goddess, with an intriguing, self-decapitating iconography depicting feminine sexuality.