These women's frenzy has turned unbridled today,
Their stirring screams sound like bhakti.
Children asleep arise abruptly from dreams,
And feel flustered being blinded by light,
Press their cheeks to the cool floor and feign as if
They were listening to the sounds from earth's belly.
The distress of these women has become adhyaatma.

This laughable Lord is blind to all things,
an omnipresent deaf with no notion of even music.
Sitting foolishly with arse across the sky,
this Lord is a firefly illumining the tip of the thorny bush.
The all knowing happy child with bobbing tuft,
this Lord is blabbering about how to bless
while simultaneously filling the sky and flowing into soul.

These women are changing their posture now,
craze is stirred, filled with bhakti,
halting a while, sipping water, suckling, cracking the toes and fingers,
tying their tress coquettishly, they are getting ready
for another moving moan.

Everything is true and fresh.
Everything is like that distant Lord and his army of saints.
The path there is of bhakti - mad somniloquy -
this is true on this moonless night.
The rest all false, corrupt and tangible.

Tired I keep looking…
in this hollow sun that is neither the ladies, nor the lord,
and with even the kids beyond reach,
and moonlit brains, and this mad laughter,
I simply stare
at the lord arising from the fog
created by the chaos of the howling ladies…

I stare. He sees all.

Translated by Kamalakar Bhat