Her Apocalypse

Here's a song I wrote in Dhaka, Bangladesh, today: while looking down from an 11th-floor cafe at the monsoon sweeping over the city, a half-naked young woman ran through the traffic, apparently very disturbed. I tried to imagine what had distressed her so... Meanwhile on another rooftop a girl and mother delighted in the rains: their saris soaked to the skin, they danced about and rearranged the pot-plants in their aerial nursery...Everywhere at some instant, the moment of one person's exaltation is the moment of someone else's apocalypse...

Her Apocalypse

Her hair is wild but her eyes are quiet
her mouth a permanent scream
she runs the streets of Dhaka 
                                                chasing the skirts of the monsoon
The elephants with the blunted tusks
                                                           shuffle restlessly in the gloom
the rickshaws flee the frightening sky
she weaves through traffic
                                           a detonation in her heart
Was she the girl who smoked at school
                                                               behind the bicycle-sheds
did she feed the black beaks of the wild crows
did she steal her boyfriend's motorbike and crash it?
Or was her birth the cataclysm
                                                  the steaming streets her collision
was her apocalypse a lightbulb-naked public thing?
Her hair is wild but her eyes are quiet
her mouth a permanent scream
she runs the streets of Dhaka
                                                chasing her apocalypse
chasing her apocalypse, her apocalypse
her apocalypse, her apocalypse...

[ENDS]