The Silent Khata Poem by Tenzin Tsewang

I do not love you as if you were a silk khata
offered to a silent god, or a butter lamp burning
in a corner where the wind never dares to step.
I love you as one loves certain dark things,
hidden between the roots of the rhododendron
and the salt-heavy steam of a traveler's tea.

Who could deny the light on your face?
To say you are not beautiful would be to lie
to the Kangchendzonga; to tell the monsoon
it has no right to drown the valley in green.
Your beauty is the first sun hitting the Tashi Drak—
a sudden, sharp warmth that breaks the heart of the snow.

Yet, I do not say 'I love you' with the easy tongue
of a merchant haggling in a crowded square.
I know that love is a heavy bell; if I strike it too soon,
the vibration might shatter the thin air of the pass.
I refuse to wrap a lie in white threads
or offer you a prayer flag that has no wind to carry it.

For there are borders that no mule track can cross,
maps drawn in ink older than the dust on my boots.
You carry the scent of a different rain, a foreign soil—
your lineage is a song of oceans I have never seen,
while I am rooted in the granite of a thousand ancestors.
The world watches us with the eyes of a hawk over the ridge,
judging this bridge built between a passport and a prayer.

And then, the tally of winters—the cruel math of the calendar.
It sits like an uninvited guest at the table
where you offer me the nectar of your youth.
How can I ask you to walk at my heavy, uneven pace,
when my shadow is already long, stretching toward the dark,
while yours is still a puddle of light beneath your feet?
The elders whisper like dry grass in the mountain wind;
they see only a foolish timber, scarred by the seasons,
leaning its weathered weight upon the fragile grace of a sapling.
They do not see that even a mountain desires to be moved.

But listen: something is shifting,
like the slow grind of a prayer wheel
turned by a hand that has finally found its rhythm.
I am beginning to seek you
the way the musk deer seeks its own scent—
uncertain, breathless,
realizing that I have already started
to lean toward your warmth like a pine tree
bowing to the weight of the coming winter.

So I stay my hand, and I hold the bell's clapper still.
I will let the mountain decide when the ice must melt.
For now, I love you the way the valley loves the mist—
without claiming it, without a word,
content to be the earth that holds your fleeting shadow.