Meera

Meera

Meera, a female dervish of Rajasthan,
you walked in the prison of your palace
with no fetters,
and before you could crawl or totter on your feet
you began to dance.
You were born without fetters,
but how would they know, the people who practised their own cult?
They made you a bride and wanted you to worship the silver trinkets they tied on your ankles.
You knew they were all warriors
who wanted no small troubles to distract them from the field of the battle,
the battle for survival and peace on their land.
You invented your own language, your lover and your bed.You poured out your love in a frenzy,
danced in the sanctum,;
You raised your feelings to insanity.
The walls of the sanctum collapsed.
The palace was too small to contain the rush of your river
in flood.
Your feet vibrated to the tune you heard, and heard alone.
They wanted to know who you sang for!
Maddening passion, a passion never content with the life they knew.
Could a woman love this way a human lover, they asked.
You pointed to the image of Krishna you first brought into your Mother's house, gifted to you by a wandering sage.
You grew with your idol;
you crossed childhood and became a woman.
He was there all along, a participant and witness of all the changes,
smooth, removing all encumbrance as you crossed each threshold of life.
He was the greatest catastrophe that happened to you,
and happened to all,
fatal for you and fatal for all.
You were a queen who could not rule.
And oh, you treacherous woman of all;
you failed in your duties as the wife to the Rajput prince
to whom you were given away as a bride.
Your defiance was amazing,
making the humans envious of God!
What a mystery, what an intrigue,
such as no palace would ever have seen!
They could not call it adultery, for that would be defilement of God.
They could not incriminate God, because that would have been blasphemy!
Meera, the greatest Master of all dichotomies!
You danced your way out of the prison-house of the palace,
drunk on the music you heard,
following the note of your harp with its single overwrought string.
You crossed the threshold of the palace to step into the wilderness of the roads and the alleys of the town.
It no longer remained a wilderness, nor did it remain a town.
They all could see your lover, enshrined everywhere,
He wore a crown adorned by a single peacock feather.
He was the deep blue of the ocean and the cloudy sky.
He dwelt in peace and played a tune on his flute
that descended down from the sky
and flooded the earth with a melody divine.
He was the one for whom you ran away from home, like a fish running into the mouth of a crocodile.
He could show you the infinite universe if he opened his mouth in a yawn. He was the one who had opened the swelling view of the cycles of aeons , life in eternal cycles of birth and death
to Arjun at the hour of his life on the battlefield,
a moment transcending fear and awe.
He was her lover, Life in Death and Death in life,
holding her hand,
firmly and tenderly,
never to let her go.
Never for a moment was she separated in life from the knowledge of this Life that killed all else.
The God, the ultimate Lover whom the world called Death
was her beautiful Lover.
A woman who was in love with death; why did they send her a potion of venom to drink? And she did drink it in faith that He would know
what to do.
And He did not want her to die. They called it a miracle of life
that she survived
and lived to tell the world
the  story of their amazing love.