In the run-up to the release of Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li at the cinema later this week, Ross Sutherland is sharing his sonnets based on the Street Fighter universe.
Today’s sonnet is about Yoga soothsayer Dhalsim. Dhalsim is like a cross between Mhatma Ghandi and Mr Tickle. He has channelled his spiritual enlightenment into the power of bendiness. Oh, and he can breathe fire. You might have overlooked that part of the Bhagavad Gita, but yeah, apparently they can do that.
We catch up with Dhalsim in 1969, at the Fire Temple of Baku in Azerbaijan. This temple used to have it’s ‘undying flame’ fed from a natural gas reserve under the temple.
However, due to heavy drilling of the gas fields during Soviet rule, the temple is now being switched over to a gas main, run from the nearby town. Dhalsim has come to meditate at the temple during the changeover.
DHALSIM (INDIA, 107 lbs)
The swami closed his eyes and prayed
as the monastery’s undying flame,
once fed from a natural vent, became
a Bunsen piped from Baku’s mains,
picturing Agni, one head incensed,
one head butchered, its final shallow breaths
like rotten eggs, the flame diffusing dense
hydrocarbons right through his exposed chest,
knowing in this instant that he had stretched
too far from Patanjali's eight-limbed text,
his faith, no more than a special effect,
a yoga slip-knot, the old man wept
to the generator’s apocryphal song,
humming in darkness, the counterfeit Aum.
The rest: RYU | E. HONDA | ZANGIEF | CHUN-LI
Mercy
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Street Fighter Sonnets #2
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I am loving these so much.
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