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Magazine Parting WordsCulture

Mutta—Free

By Mutta, Adapted by Matty Weingast

Winter 2019

One morning after begging for my food—
looking down at one more meal
I hadn’t worked for,
hadn’t paid for,
hadn’t earned.

A life of debts I could never repay
pushing in on all sides
like the weight of the sea.

I blinked,
and a
tear
fell into
my bowl.

Would it always feel like this?

Just as the moon rises up
from the bottom of the sea,
a handful of rice lifted
itself from the bottom of my bowl.

And my heart rose with it.

I wish I could tell you how it tasted—

that first bite of food
as a free woman.

— Mutta

♦

From The First Free Women: Poems of the Early Buddhist Nuns by Matty Weingast © 2020 by Matty Weingast. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. shambhala.com

Mutta was one of the first Buddhist nuns. Her poetry is found in the Therigatha collection ("Verses of the Elder Nuns.")
Matty Weingast is an former editor of the Insight Journal at Barre Center for Buddhist Studies and the author of a new rendering of the Therigatha, The First Free Women: Poems of the Early Buddhist Nuns.