Five Poems by Sreelekha Chatterjee

 

Missing a River’s Familiar Home

Sailing a boat, my eyes are dim,

the river’s brim doesn’t hold its water’s name.

Ice thawing, infinite oceans overwhelming,

while the rivers are empty—

true identities missing, 

realities are soundless myriads.

Bounteous universe of the river purports its beginning,

an insignificant canal spells its expiration.

Nothing is permanent in its life of lives;

boundless future limited by the shallow present—

voices giggling, chatting, chanting 

on river cruise vessels moving to and fro.

Eco-friendly solar–electric hybrid boats

wheel into the memory of the forthcoming—unborn.

River men dream of trees, sand on the shores

and running waters of the spinal river—

new ones unite with the old ones,

thoughts pausing and splitting like riven waves.

The heavy florilegium, drivers of fantasy

pardon the greyish, frothy water,

while the wielders of democracy

see the vitreous pouring of the cerulean sky.

Scorched and blackened, ankle-deep,

stressed holding religious events

that discard their remains.

Lugging my boat down the waterway,

I feel the pent-up river unable to drain,

its channel long blocked by human detritus.

Tranquility of the river and its rejuvenation

cease loudly, wreathing its gloom;

lucid shadows in the water highlight

its creeping sleep of death.

Those Who Never Returned From Exile

Under the sky’s blue seal, once reigned a spotless sapphire sea,

the coral reefs visible, as clear as glass.

Now, countless fleets of fishers, tourist boats on the sea’s throbbing heart

ensnare its—what used to be unseizable—bionetwork.

Voices are heard in the air of somewhere global,

of warming uncontrolled, impurities straying, none to withhold.  

Peace floats like a come-and-go perfumed tide—

ebbs and flows along with the spume,

when one promenades on the sand

that is unable to gather form in the wild.

Dark clouds drift on the horizon,

isles seen in-and-out of sight.

Traditions that walked miles eons ago—

settled, mingled, some yet to discover

the secrets of the advanced tribe.

Each Andamanese mind holds enigmas, a cellular jail

where freedom—from hunting–gathering—struggles continue to thrive.

Penal colonies taken over by the independent progressives;

governing the clannish society, a distant dream, 

a ban temporarily—or forever—for the wise.

Zero immunity and fiendish moves of a few communities

on spotting a flag of modernism, total abandon of archive.

Akin to a frigatebird, one half of their brain

sleeps, while the other maintains the flight.

Temblors and receding sea beach make them wonder,

ancient folklores hint at a disaster.

On an impulse waxing their judgment,

strange, sun-toasted bodies turn to higher ground.

From the mountains, safe and sound,

beyond their eyes’ reach, 

they envision demonic tsunami waves

dash with zeal and might—beaches 

and forests soon disappear underneath.

Calm ensues, water—no longer of pain—leaves, 

all that is submerged is once again seen.

A helicopter hovers above

like a worry, as a buzzing bee in the mind,

till pointed arrows deflect the complexities of contemporary life.

They have demands of Nature fulfilled,

but Nature has spells of tame and torture.

Man—trapped in stone age or evolved to the nuclear age—

has never learned to surrender.

Sundarbans Will Continue to Live and Die

Nestled in the delta—where the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Meghna

meet the Bay of Bengal—Sundarbans alive, 

existence immersive but rare and fragile. 

Mind’s eye wanders—twinning, vigilant—

seeing with both cognizance and ignorance—

sighting the lush green, dense canopy, visible vegetation;

unaware of the intricate below-water

root and the unapparent level of the ecosystem.

A natural bounty of mangroves

or a terminal minefield for 

its unheeded inhabitants,

a throw of dice to survive? 

Beneath the drooping fronds

harbored by bowing branches,

touching the ever-whimsical brackish water,

breathe dark shadows, akin to a devil’s lair playing behind.

Sentinels of the swamp—Hethal and Sundari—

depleting like the hair on an oldster’s head.

Frequent cyclones intensifying, 

wind-ruffled tidal surges dip the forest, 

blights soil infrastructure, gnawing on its pride,

while throats dry like parched earth, 

thirsty in a watery desert of brine.

Will silver harvest, sweet gold, brown barks yield enough bread?

Or, is there a dying need to shift to new occupations under constraint?

Banabibi’s protective power reigns,

a belief in which Muslims and Hindus unite—

their fellowship of old and young, equally of sorrow and joy. 

Dakkhin Rai haunts the jungle, keeper of tigers prowls;

folktales that hint toward an ancient knowledge 

to respect and coexist with nature—

remembrance and obliviousness together never die.

Will they ever come face-to-face in their survival fights?

The end perhaps no man shall know.

Rise in the sea level unnatural,

counting trees and Royal Bengal tigers 

seems a futile exercise.

Building tomorrow in a world of today—

hope aerial roots of mangroves will continue

to access air, activate their snorkel-like function, 

when stifled and choked in waterlogged, oxygen-poor soil,

with memories of home like a wondrous, fresh dawn

after a long, solitary night.

An Upsurge of Glacial Tears

Shako Chho, a glacial lake—size of seventy

football fields—remains placid

in the lap of the eastern Himalayas.

Serenity breaks when its soul’s pride

is haunted by watery inundations and landslides.

Thangu valley beneath shudders,

unprepared, unsuitably balanced for contingencies, 

at its sudden levee failure

like a promise once held sacred, suddenly hard to keep.

A few hundred people—semi-nomadic Lachenpas—

busy with their farming during the summer and monsoon

wearies at the thought of the restless lake,

resembling a society in conflict, by traitors sold, turned to perfidy.

When winter descends with thick layers of snow,

they move to their second home, down the valley furthermore.

Flood’s fury, tossing swells govern,

a seven-minute duration,

short warning time, to enact devastation.

Accumulated debris and sediment, 

snow avalanches in a chain reaction,

melt accelerated when the Earth burns,

glaciers recede and liquified water floods—

a fast-expanding lake is nothing but a natural curse.

Fixing—check dams, workable monitoring systems—

an onerous task, a race against time. 

Question of relocation is a hard essay;

home for centuries, an abode where they reside. 

Note: Thangu valley in Sikkim is being threatened by glacial lake outburst floods.

In the Shadows of Extinction

Gentle giants claim residency in villages;

coffee, banana, and coconut plantations under threat,

chasing away the energetic bee over our creamy cup

no easy feat, with conflicts escalating around.

Human lives and urbanization hold places in reservation charts,

while the tuskers’ names strike off from the forest maps.

Unprecedented rate of encroachment into their habitat,

as does the poaching scourge for profitable ivory tusks.

Ropes and wild snares trick them like pigs and deer,

maimed body parts, their survival defeated by infectious bouts.

Elephant statues adorn our display shelves,

impart strength and favor good fortune, they all say.

Hued in red, black, white, green, they are positioned

to channel beneficial energy in the living spaces.

Power dissolves with a broken piece,

the real one’s cry seldom riots our heart’s peace.

Along with each one, the sky falls on the ground,

whoever the soil needs remains in indefinite doubt.

Pathways lost in dense forests, waterholes

in dry riverbeds no longer come to the fore.

Seeds that need passage through digestive tracts

wait forever to sprout in the forest, no respite from the moil.

Dung beetles starved over tightly packed soil,

elephant fertilizer in scarcity, plants in nutrient drought.

Depleting number never resumes calm,

we reap what we sow,

overlooking the hands that plough rich and deep,

but we sleep in comfort, sound—ignorant of the turnabout. 

Ancestors forgotten like an ancient tribe,

their benediction we no longer seek.  

Sreelekha Chatterjee is a poet from New Delhi, India. Her poems have appeared in Madras Courier, Setu, Verse-Virtual, Timber Ghost Press, Suburban Witchcraft Magazine, Ninth Heaven, The Wise Owl, Porch Literary Magazine, Orenaug Mountain Poetry Journal, Creative Flight, Pena Literary Magazine, Fevers of the Mind, and in the anthologies—Enchanted Encounters (Bitterleaf Books, UK); Go, the Prayer Has Been Sent (Orenaug Mountain Publishing, USA); and Christmas-Winter Anthology Volume 4 (Black Bough Poetry, Wales, UK), among others. Her poems have been widely published in more than forty journals, magazines, and anthologies globally across thirteen countries, and translated into Korean and Romanian languages.

 

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