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.
***
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 tusked
the ground for something, like
Varaha fishing out the earth
from the primordial waters.
That night, we heard no quail or owl.
Made no sound or bet.
Just stood there listening
to the beat of black hoof,
watching the light pound
on the mane off his back.
It was as if we had learned
to be newly silent. And all
the primal symbols came
back to us, rushing to our fingers
as if we had become
prehistoric women painting
the cavewalls: the ox, the toad,
the drum, the fish. And we drew
dark shapes in the wet mud
as the boar upended the earth
and we couldn’t tell
the work of animal
from the work of god.
