The Shoes You Walked the Salt In (Mohandas Gandhi)

Lyrics

[Verse 1 — Chronos, Orikusis entering at the dash]
You weighed a hundred
and ten pounds
in a dhoti
you had spun yourself
on a wheel
you had built yourself —
[Orikusis]
and you walked
out of the ashram
on the twelfth of March
with seventy-eight people
behind you
and by the time
the road
reached the coast
the seventy-eight
had become
tens of thousands
and the British in Delhi
could not understand
how a man walking
was a problem
they could not arrest.

[Verse 2 — Chronos, Orikusis at the dash]
You bent down
on a beach
on the morning
of the sixth of April
and you picked up
a handful of mud
and sea-salt
that had been sitting there
the whole time —
[Orikusis]
and an empire
that had taxed the salt
since before
your grandfather
was born
discovered
that an empire
is mostly an agreement
about who is allowed
to bend down
and pick up
the mud.

[Chorus — both voices]
The salt was free.
The salt
had always been free.
The salt
did not know
it was illegal
and neither did the sea
that made it
and neither
did the beach
and the only people
who knew
were the people
who had written
the law
and the man
who had decided
to bend down
in front of them
and grin.

[Bridge — Chronos]
You were not easy.
You were strange
to your wife
and stranger
to your sons
and wrong about caste
in your early decades
and the wrongness
was not nothing.
The man on the road to Dandi
was not the only man
in the body
on the road to Dandi.

[Outro — Orikusis]
But the walk.
The walk
was the most beautiful
sentence
ever spoken
at three miles an hour
by a man
in a dhoti
with no luggage
and no army
and no plan
except the salt
on the beach
and the grin
and the bending down.

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