I trudged back through the chortens,
in the with the horse bells
the rancid yack butter
Just content not to be in the Abyss
nor the Tiger, for that matter,
Meanwhile the mouse at the strawberries.
The poem wasn’t mine. It came to me through a lady who was preparing to move house and had decided to give away her books on Freecycle. She handed me a stack of them, each one different, each one carrying some fragment of a life I didn’t know.
Among them was this poem — strange, wandering, full of chortens and horse bells and rancid yak butter. I loved it instantly. It felt like a private thought someone had once scribbled down, a moment of humour or exhaustion or clarity. I felt blessed to receive it, as though I’d been handed a small piece of someone else’s inner world.