Let me do nothing

Let me languish a little longer
in silence, in doing nothing,
just watching my breath
and savoring the occasional thought
as it comes flurrying in the wake
of the Name or the Mantra.

Let me do nothing for a few hours more
let me just sit and breathe
and watch my body from the inside
and create a soothing world within
this healthy body
this healthy mind.

Let me waste the day in nirjan bhajan,
contrived nothingness
letting the exhortations of Samuel Smiles
and the dramatic exemplifications of Horatio Alger
-- yeah, the commands of God-on-High to fight --
drift by like leaves in an invisible breeze.

Let me indulge my excentricity just a little longer,
for life itself will not tolerate one so indifferent to Work.

My house, like Gadadhar's, is also situated
precariously on a brief precipice to the
broad and muscular Ganga,
which even in the dry season
powers its way imperially towards the sea.

The house glimmers white in the sun
as you cross the river in a ferry,
seen from all quarters like a lighthouse,
but it is built on sand
and stands there awaiting the next
inevitable flood.

And here in Vrindavan, doom takes another form.
The new teachers of the Gita, teaching Karma-yoga and rajo-guna,
who wanted to turn the teeming, underachieving masses
into a billion worker bees, can now look down from their heavens
and marvel at how their experiment has worked.

And what has been lost as this Kali bursts in
and floods the town with honking horns and herculean hoardings;
another flood to wash away silence
the contemplation is to be erased
from the karma yoga paradise
of the interchangeable
"progress" party.

The fantasy castles are being washed away
the fantasies we cherish here today
are gone tomorrow, with no one to read the eulogy.