Moksha [Release]

Photo: Barbie Robinson

I have come to your shores

having buried all.

I bring you my head.*

You hurl me into sky.

I fall as flowers

on your heaving Body.

Inebriated

I can be lion, boar, snake, and demon.**

I unspeak and undance.

Who dares wrench me towards sanity?

I howl. Immortality dispels.

Here is Death’s intense subjectivity.

You are a snake that coils me

into the infinite whirlpool

of Your tormented dance.

Who seeks to uncoil?

They who are dance illiterate.

They who fear its sensual self-absorption.

Don’t wake me.

Don’t enlighten me.

Don’t understand me.

In the poetry of Darkness

I finally meet me—

unlettered, unseen, undefined.

I am free.

-Padma Menon

Photo: Barbie Robinson

This poem is inspired by many images from Vedic hymns as well as the particular sensibility with which philosophical principles such as Moksha are invoked in earlier times. Moksha in its simplest meaning is release, like the release of an arrow from the bow. This physical source of the word is very much retained in these ancient hymns. Moksha’s meaning of spiritual liberation is tethered here to its Body-led expression

*Bringing one’s head is the archetypal invocation of the intention to relinquish all knowledge before one ventures on one’s sacred inquiry.

**These lines are based on the invocation of madness in dance. Madness here is the state of being where one’s limited adherence to the definition of “human” falls away. It is an expression of alchemical shape-shifting.