Flying lizards motor-raced
From one tree to another
As we made love
after war over identities.

She, Sonamuni Bui,
a Ho-tribal woman
Me, “diku”, an outsider in their language,
Actually a drifter with nothing to lose,
In pursuit of an elusive dream,
on the run with a stolen assault rifle,
As the police are, after me in
“operation anaconda”.

Shadows grew tall over seven hundred hills
At dusk- fall
as a volcanic love bubbled up
within us
Under the leafy
Saranda’s Kiriburu Loyall.
Isn’t escape from home an aphrodisiac?

Out on the hills, from somewhere deep inside its tectonic movement
Identities had clashed once in Kolhan uprising
Bathing hills with blood
but love is beyond history.

As we rolled on the grass in our naked game,
heady on haria and mahua,
the local brew,
I burrowed inside her
and she cried: “Diku Love”,
ripping through the silence of the hill.
Over with it,
her mind begins to drift as I picked up the rifle,
she cried:
“What can you do except kill, loot and get us pregnant?”

She missed a deeper conspiracy though,
Bagger 288 bucket wheel excavators
Hollowing out
Ore rich hills,
Gouging its womb out
for metals
noise of drilling machines
baying for Nature’s blood.
When everything is blurry, who is able to see face in the mirror?
(bullet ridden body of the speaker in this poem
was found later in jungles of Saranda in 2011)
End