Read the poems here:
Pip: Welcome to osoparavos.com — where the spiritual and the literary collide somewhere above ten thousand feet.
Mara: Today we’re spending the whole episode inside one extended work — a poetic fantasy rooted in the Kathmandu Valley, written by Adam Donaldson Powell. It moves through ritual, meditation, and the tension between sacred celebration and a suffering world. Let’s start with the poem itself.
Extreme poetry: “In the valley of the Kingdom”
Mara: “In the Valley of the Kingdom” is a book-length poetic fantasy drawn from Powell’s collection “Rapture: Endings of Space and Time.” It moves through the Dashain festival — Nawa Ratri through Dashami — tracking both outer ceremony and inner transformation, with a recurring figure: the poet savant who haunts the margins of the Valley’s celebrations.
Pip: The prologue sets the coordinates immediately — the Kathmandu Valley ringed by Dorje Lakpa, Gauri Shankar, Gyachungkang, and Sagarmatha — and drops the reader straight into the eve of ritual. The scene is sensory overload in the best possible way.
Mara: The prologue earns that overload. Here is the passage that pivots the whole poem outward: “My heart pains for the unfortunate beyond the Kingdom who suffer loneliness, hunger, war and terror without ultimate joy and release; strangers to our ways although still brothers and sisters in the Great Scheme.”
Pip: So the poem is not content to stay inside the festival. The Valley becomes a lens — the warmth of Dashain illuminates, by contrast, Iraq, Gaza, Darfur, the sprawling cities of the Americas and Asia. The joy is real; the grief just outside it is also real.
Mara: That tension runs through every section. In Ghatasthapana, the chant “I invite the Lord into my heart” repeats like a mantra while, simultaneously, a television next door broadcasts bombs and famine — until the Goddess cuts the electricity and the world falls into the silence that begins the puja.
Pip: The structure does something clever there — the ritual literally silences the news cycle. Whether that reads as transcendence or as willful turning away is left entirely to the reader.
Mara: The Buddhist Temple sections introduce the Vajrayana frame — the vajracarya, the Adamantine vehicle, the mantra “OM VAJRAPAANI HUUM” — pulling the poem from Hindu festival into a layered Tantric register. By Maha Asthami, the speaker is somewhere between vision and hallucination, and the poet savant is prostrating mechanically until she awakens in ecstasy.
Pip: Nawami is where the poem goes spare and stark — short lines, knee-deep in blood at the temple of Taleju, the air described as black with the smell of slaughtered buffaloes. After all that incense and chanting, it lands hard.
Mara: And then Dashami exhales into three quiet repetitions of “Namaste” and a promise to wait for Laxmi. The epilogue returns to street level — Freak Street, taxis, rickshaws — where the poet savant reappears as a beggar, and a barefoot child places the poem’s final blessing: “May Good transcend Evil, and Light lessen the Darkness you carry within you.”
Pip: The whole arc lands there — the sacred doesn’t stay in the temple. It ends up in a child’s outstretched palms on a busy pavement.
Mara: Powell frames the work as part of “Rapture: Endings of Space and Time,” available through Cyberwit.net and Amazon — worth knowing if the poem opens a door you want to walk further through.
Pip: The Valley holds the festival; the festival holds the world. That’s the whole argument, compressed.
Mara: What stays with me is how the poem holds ceremony and catastrophe in the same breath — neither cancels the other out.
Pip: Sacred space as a way of seeing outward, not escaping inward. More of that next time.
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