by Mandira Ghissing
Life is inherently mysterious and for some specially called upon to be the bearer of its enigmas, the insightful secrets could be a gift whereas the dire ones could be a curse. Mandira Ghissing’s poem is a whimsical take on the extraordinary, almost heroic, effort required of us to carry this burden.
The tree had secrets.
Only on the day it was felled
(To keep it from crashing on the heads of passersby
During crazy Darjeeling Monsoons),
Did we see the scars
On its raw flesh, now laid bare.
Layer upon layer,
The growing up pangs
Were tightly packed in rings,
Twisted by the effort to keep it all in –
The first primal tingling
That let life in it burst forth;
The intimate touch of earth on root,
Roots on trunk, trunk on branches,
Branches on leaves, flower, fruit;
Dark tales of ancient flood and fire;
Words of love and hate,
Whispered, hissed
Beneath its quiet shade,
Heard by the rough bark, even by the babbling leaves;
And the unspeakable grief of the lone branch when all its
Little birds, without a warning, flew the nest.
That night I stood by the window
With enormous swathes of darkness swelling between us
And the icy splash of moon on the carcass of the tree
And understood only this about the burden of secrets –
That the tree had many
and had kept them till the end.
I wonder
If, at last, they would cut me open
And discover, quite baffled, deep dark grooves
Burnt into my core,
Going round and round in circles,
Knotted tightly in a whorl.
Mandira Ghissing teaches English in Darjeeling Government College. She identifies herself as a small-town girl with a passion for poetry. Reading poems is, for her, a way of connecting with the wider world and writing them, a means of coming home to herself.
