We got out of Delhi in the nick of time - a 7 hour taxi drive from the north into the city and a flight to Heathrow. Within 24 hours, the restaurants and hotels were shutting - stranded, we would have been in a pickle. Coming into Delhi, we passed the huge Ghazipur rubbish dump, so big that they are talking of putting lights on top to alert aircraft. The 5 mile radius of this has high morbidity rates, breathing problems, cancer. Thousands of tons are added to it each day. The following poem is about our rush from Rishikesh. The chai stall really was attacked by an elephant, and a man in an Anonymous mask had shouted that strange war cry, which set me thinking about the push pull between man and nature, especially at this time of pandemic. They say that it's possible to predict disease flare ups in places where man develops - roads through forests and villages for example. The Hendra virus in Malaysia and in Australia comes from fruit bats whose excrement ended up in the food chain of pigs, which in turn were eaten by man. They estimate that planting only small forests in malaria affected areas can decrease malaria vastly, repopulating wasteland with birds and insects that eat the mosquitos. I wonder, when this is all over, if we'll reimagine our interaction with the environment differently. We're all in this together, man and beast.
I wrote this poem on the plane on the way to England, and my husband helped edit it with me. This often happens - I come up with the idea, the shape of the poem, the flow, and helps with a few edits as we discuss stanza shifts, punctuation, metaphor, vocabulary. Poems can be like sudoku puzzles and are immensely pleasurable to lose yourself within. I count myself lucky I have a scientist for a husband with a grasp of grammar and symbolism.
I hope you enjoy this one - it's one of my favourites, and I'm really proud for this post to be my first on Hive, and to share it in the InkWell community. The theme was about birds and freedom - in the end, I had the birds, but not the freedom. The circling birds had to be seen to be believed. They looked like murmurations of starlings - there were thousands of them. I couldn't get a snap from the taxi but was honestly just gobsmacked in awe of the absolute monstrosity of it. Those birds weren't free - they were as dependent on the dump as the lives of the humans that sifted through it.
The circling birds of Ghazipur Image Source
Flight Path
Two days ago, the shy elephant hour
After midnight, a chai stall crushed.
Crops crunched too in the purple light, like cane torn to syrupy shreds in crimson jaggery engines.
A clown in an anonymous mask roared with pachydermic trumpeting -
Nature is at war with man!
I shouted back - Ha! 'Tis t'other way around!
Later, fuelled by viral urgency & parantha spiced heavy with seeds,
We share the road with bison tugging
Carts & cows, old woman in saris
Tuk tuk heavy, bricks on scooters
Urged on by bare foot boys & saddhus
Covered in ashes, all travelling
Somewhere, expansive or contracting their flight paths.
The winged things secret illusory freedoms in feathered pockets - a passport stamped
By breathy Maya, who whispers their binding to cosmic law - blue night Kali joins, hums a mother-time song
To daughters of India - the kingfishers
Magnetized to canals & grey hornbills
Avoid tangling in prayers,
Flags faded in fig trees
Winged and footed, all obey this hidden geometry, though we worry more about papered borders.
As we pass the black kites keening over the behemoth of Delhi's waste,
Like the crushed stall, the shadowed beast is darkly peripheral to vision,
All are subject to its reckoning.
This is no simple conflict.
Thus, Agra's white palace has less poetry than the fetid dump of this ragged city
Where raptors circle, soaring
Bound as near mothers whose scouring cannot defeat the toxic air
Where can they go?
Where can we go?
The pups whose coats are black with leachate do not know, nor the rats.
They'll no more break free than us - all are raptured.
An increasing field, potential gaining
The more we push outward, the more we are closed in.
Mathematics argue a small forest planted can reduce malaria by half -
Zoonotic pestilence is the sum of human industry plus ecological distress
The domino effect -
a bat in a market, the closing vectors, the shut gates.
We are on the last flight from India, but we are not free.
No more than the birds of Ghazipur.
