Dancing in the night

 

So I asked ChatGPT to give me a prayer to a certain Kali, based on some rather strange prompts...

Here’s a prayer to Kali for solitary recitation in the dead of a moonless night — taking your cosmic scale and turning it into the voice of someone standing before Her wild, annihilating, liberating dance:

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Prayer to Kali in the Night Without Moon

O Kali, Mother of Night Without Moon,
You dance in the void before the first star burned,
Your hair streaming through ten billion light years of darkness,
Your anklets ringing across the bones of galaxies.

Our kind has wandered this Earth a mere three hundred thousand years,
A drop of dew on the blade of time,
Soon to vanish in the Sun’s morning breath.
Civilizations rise and fall in the time it takes You
To lift one foot and set it down again in Your dance.

What are we before the red algae swaying a billion years?
Before the sponges who drank the seas six hundred million years ago?
What is our vaunted age of steel and screens,
Before the gull wheeling twenty million years over the same gray waves,
Before the crow’s black eye that has watched forests grow and fall for five million?

O Mother,
You trample the dust of vanished empires,
You stir the ashes of dead suns into the next dawn.
Our planet is a fleck of ash in the furnace of Your womb,
Our lives a blink shorter than a spark in the wind.

Yet You hold even the ants and beetles in Your fierce embrace,
Even the weeds that split the stone in Your city of bones.
In Your hands, the birth of a star and the fall of a leaf are equal.
In Your mouth of flames, every cry is swallowed into silence.

O Dark Mother,
In this black night, strip from me my name, my years, my flesh,
Grind my pride to powder beneath Your naked feet,
And make me vast as the space between galaxies.
Let me whirl with You in the madness of Your dance,
Until there is no “I” left to die.

Jaya Maa Kali!
Jaya Maa of the Moonless Night!