[I wrote this poem 15 years ago while watching a tree being cut for widening the road near the IIT-Madras campus. As with back then, even now, my heart aches when I watch a tree fall!]
She’s falling.
She, who shade gave and fruits bore,
For the greedy ones who wanted more
Is in a thud, landing.
She’s falling.
What we can’t, for us she in the sun makes.
But we ungrateful with a stroke of the axe,
Her are killing…..
She’s falling.
Tears roll down my cheeks; helpless I’m watching
Her avian refugees in the skies go screeching.
And Earth’s seething.
She’s falling.
She, in who nestled many a beautiful creature;
She, who piously did her companions nurture,
Her fall’s appalling!
She fell.
But with it to her murderers sounded death knell.
For later, Nature rebuked. Rains stopped and dry went the well
And man saw hell.
She fell.
But taught the foolish man
To ‘live and let live’.
And in his life span ‘Take’ later, but first ‘give’.
© Vidya Venkat (2006)
Published by Writers Workshop, Kolkata.
An anthropologist among the journalists 