Poetry

Two Poems

by Sumana Roy

The landing of a two-story house. The house looks both dated and neglected and feels empty. — From the *Capital in Transition* series by Ravi Agarwal / raviagarwal.com / Reproduced by permission of the artist

Asvattha

You’ve taken your name literally:
Asvattha: under which horses stand.
Hence the tireless gallop in your leaves;
their tips — like horsetails — are wind vanes.
They flicker as if it was a rehearsal for a storm —
but it’s true, every moment is a rehearsal of death.
No, they’re perhaps rehearsing life:
movement is a prison they want to be freed from.
The leaves are moving — like tongues, like time, like tradition,
like things rise inside an oven, soft and curious.
The leaves are moving — they’re like smoke,
always waiting for the wind to push them.
The leaves are moving, the light is dying,
they are surrendering to rambling darkness,
to its intimacy which preserves constancy.

The leaves are moving though I can’t see them.
Air can’t enter, soot clogs the frame.
Yet they’ll be there tomorrow, I know —
like Dilli, like its PM^*, they have nowhere to go.

*PM: Particulate Matter; also Prime Minister

PWD Plant

What does one do with so much love,
a government’s love?
Dig the earth, portion the uncountable,
force life — seed, sapling, consequence —
into hoarse formal pots
(as if they were a church),
water them, flood at first,
then like tea from a teapot,
soon as scanty as spit, thirst;
divide roads with plant graveyard pots,
baptize this monoculture
— these voteless citizens of the NCR —
with a republican seal,
a meticulous acronym:
a new species,
no, a new genus:
PWD^*?

*PWD: Public Works Department

Sumana Roy is the author of two works of nonfiction, How I Became a Tree and Provincials; Plant Thinkers of Twentieth-Century Bengal, a work of literary criticism; Missing: A Novel; My Mother’s Lover and Other Stories; and two collections of poems, Out of Syllabus and VIP: Very Important Plant. She teaches at Ashoka University, Sonipat.