Poetry: Salted mud cakes
Painting: N. Swarnalatha
By Prithvijeet Sinha
I see them cough up the word ‘environment’,
eat well, clothe themselves in bran-free breads and sugar-free self-preservation.
You’ll see them too,
they smile and are casually well-intentioned,
as they stand for a cap on global warming and then hole up in presentable cars,
air-conditioners and all.
Too good to be truly true,
too little to quantify a movement.
Suede and leather, they rub on the rostrums of a globalised earth,
drag their weary tongues through very common platitudes,
big jargons and some special terms of social awakening.
Then take-out supper for them from fast food neighbourhoods.
Modern equivalents,
crusaders of the good earth
with their hearts in the right place,
too much modernities in troubles that they take home,
as the spaces are dug out from dungs
and fossil fuels expire,
another idea of an ecological park is scrapped for realty rain checks.
They speak in third person at home and work,
the sane voice that never truly invested in commendable activism.
‘Our Earth’
yet the audience cares little and children are miffed at euthanized outdoors,
urging big counterparts to pass grants for a real park for them,
spread across the greater part of the city plain.
I see them,
I hear them,
I witness them.
They try to push reforms, not just mince words,
until their resolve fails when exhaust fumes blast them at the umpteenth traffic jam.
We live in apartments,
parking lots are all you see,
and a garden is a truth unto luxury.
Grandpa says he has worn his eightieth year,
his favourite gardens and walkways have the ‘late’ honorific.
They bid adieu, he says, and he has been in and out of hospital rooms,
but unable to go out much.
He is too naive
He plucked a bunch of fresh flowers from a plot once,
smelled it,
thus blaming this trespass for all the commotion now.
The accursed earth, he says, has earned its distaste from his action.
He blames himself too much, of late.
Innocent man.
The good earth wasn’t his burden.
Environment is coughed up again at the nearest rally,
its syllables have been buried in the land granted to city’s building giant,
while Grandpa lost his hearing aid and the environment became an abstract in isolation.
Bio:
Prithvijeet Sinha is from Lucknow. He has recently completed his M.Phil. from the Department of English and Modern European Languages, University of Lucknow. He is an avid writer and has translated his love for poetry into the art of creating poems of his own. He has been publishing on the worldwide reading and writing community, Wattpad, since 2015. He has contributed his poetry to collections, besides publishing his poem in GNOSIS Journal. He has also been publishing on his blog, ‘An Awadh Boy’s Panorama’. He believes that the minute impulses of our lives come to the fore in the intricacies of poetry.
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