TBR brings you two poems from Kunjana Parashar’s debut poetry book They Gather Around Me, the Animals. While the book is dedicated to the small wonders of the natural world like mulch, aphids, lac bugs on a Kusum tree, fleas, bees, and others, what is noteworthy is her attention to their increasing silence, their invisibility from our periphery, their fast vanishing sounds. The book invokes an eye towards not only a fading ecology, but is also conversant about the fast vanishing world of creatures small, quiet and often defenceless.

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Afterwards

I woke with a start. Like a bell whose tongue had been asleep for years, now suddenly cast into music. I gargled the damp air. I was a forest. Of course I was. Maggots feasted on the rump of a dead horse. Everything eats, was my first real thought. My feet felt like a tree that hadn’t moved in years, roots clinging to the udder of the earth. My dreams felt fungal. Stemless mushrooms grew on my calves. When I yawned, birds flew out from the O of my mouth. Deer mewled like little rats. Everywhere was fern.

The Boar

And suddenly, he was there,in the moonlight, dark as a fig.A conch made out of stone,he stood before the tall grass.Lowering his head, he tuskedthe ground for something, likeVaraha fishing out the earthfrom the primordial waters.That night, we heard no quail or owl.Made no sound or bet.Just stood there listeningto the beat of black hoof,watching the light poundon the mane off his back.It was as if we had learnedto be newly silent. And allthe primal symbols cameback to us, rushing to our fingersas if we had becomeprehistoric women paintingthe cavewalls: the ox, the toad,the drum, the fish. And we drewdark shapes in the wet mudas the boar upended the earthand we couldn’t tellthe work of animalfrom the work of god.