The Archer

Photo: Barbie Robinson

“Just look at how much content is published on each platform daily:

• TikTok – 23 million

• YouTube – 216 million

• Facebook – 350 million

• X – 500 million

• LinkedIn – 2 million

• Instagram – 95 million

…Between those 6 social networks, over 1.1 billion new pieces of content are being published [daily].”

-Neil Patel, Entrepreneur, 14th February 2024

The Artisan crafted this Bow

from bone, sinew, and wood.

Then She created this Arrow

flint-tipped, Death-scented.

Destiny and passion ceremonially

gifted this Bow and Arrow to me.

Am I Archer, I wonder,

paralysed in 1.1 billion narratives.

Dis-eased I bleed life.

Blood-clad, I flee to the forest.

And there the Bow and Arrow beckon

seductively glinting beneath leaves.

I seize the long-forgotten Bow

and ancient scents assail my senses.

In all directions she bends,

strong, sensuously yielding.

To her I connect Arrow’s wisdom

of fossil truths of cataclysms.

In missile release position**

I wait for aeons.***

The Gods ask me:

Archer why do you wait?

I tell the Gods:

I wait for poetry.

They pour themselves as intoxication

into my attendance of bounded fire.

Now I know how to pull Arrow into my heart

and unbound oceans in my hips.

Now I know how to bear intimacy

stretched from me into eternity.

Now Nature conspires liberation

and Arrow is flung into wilderness.

A poem streaks across 1.1 billion stories

an unseen meteor on a cloudy night.

Did Death gift cataclysm

and renew a distant Earth’s fertility?

Am I Archer?

Am I prepared for oblivion?

-Padma Menon

*The archer is an ancient archetype across many traditions. It is also a central invocation in Rasa dance. This poem is inspired by the Archer dance invocation which has been set out in the Natya Shastra (the ancient treatise on dance circa 500 BCE-500 CE). The Archer is the intelligence of expression and action in the world. It proposes the dynamic interplay of Body, skill, poetry, passion, and expression as the transformative manifestation in the world.

**This is an archetypal dance position used for discharge of missiles including arrows.

***The ancient stewards of performative traditions are said to wait for a year for the Gods to notice and to ask them what they wanted.