by Sarba Roy
I have aged with wisdom to the extent
that my skin is an adventure of terrains;
my veins are visible from a million miles away,
spread out like roots of a timeless tree −
where once sailed the ships of civilization,
which once fed and watered the first of men,
that once were the source of your epics,
but now toxic and fetid like a shelter of hens.
You call me mother and my protector, Shiva
and yet my serpents who once ran blue
are shrinking and drying for your lack of prayers,
dying of stillness and choking in soot.
There’s a mole to the west of my body;
arid and dry and devoid of rains
and despite the dearth of water,
there are glittering panels to keep you sane.
You call me mother, you’re born out of me,
raised in the shelter of my mighty saree
that runs from North to the wilderness of East,
has kept invaders and winds astray
for centuries so that your fertile plains
do not perish or flood away.
I’m still a child in the womb of this Earth;
a peninsula floating in amniotic fluid,
rocked by the dreams of a billion beings
and lulled to sleep by sanguine lullabies.
You bled an ocean for my freedom once,
you fought with nought and died as one
and now that I’m yours for an eternity,
you seem to have forgotten how precious I was.
So I’ll rise like the Gods you’ve formed out of me;
like Shiva with a resolve for transformation,
for you seem to have lost the vision that
I’m a child, a mother, I am energy and God,
I’m a country the shape of a kite;
learn to pull me by the right strings
and watch with wonder my flight.
