Image: Unsplash, downloaded (https://unsplash.com/photos/NtWBW4Ysyi0) 25.7.2021.
A hotel worker asks Kiran: Do you prefer to be in a more developed place or a more backwards place?
A hotel worker asks Kiran: Do you prefer to be in a more developed place or a more backwards place?
Kiran responds:
In some cities people bathe naked on the streets under a super mall.
In others they live in two story cottages,
But still have no money to afford heating.
Where I was born, people have more coins in their purse than friends to be called.
Over here, people laugh over anything.
One web catches many flies,
The other is bereft of food,
But in both places spiders are living.
I have been from New Zealand to Ecuador,
Seen tribal lands and skyscrapers,
Tundra villages and lakeside houses.
Land is land.
People are people.
The earth is one.
How it looks in one corner or another makes no difference to me.
Author about Himself: My name is Kiran Bhat. I am an Indian-American traveller, polyglot, and author who has been to 132 countries, lived in 19 cities of the world, and speaks 12 languages. I am primarily known as the author of the English-language story cycle, "We of the Forsaken World..." (Iguana Books, 2020), but have had four books published in four other languages, and have had my work published in The Kenyon Review, The Colorado Review, The Southern Humanities Review, PANK, Eclectica, 3:AM, and many others. In September 2019, I published a book of Mandarin-language poems "客然恼说"("Kiran Speaks") with White Elephant Press in Taiwan. The poems are a unique fusion of Bhakti-style emotion with Confucian dialectic rhetoric.
