Reckoning
The night darkens outside my window
in blank verse. Trees blindfolded by leaves
stand transfixed, unable to make up their minds.
The dagger of the moon whetted to a silvery sheen
looms apparitional, the handle towards my hand.
Hand me the frayed halter of starlight
that can guide my galloping heart
to where your fulgurant smile
strikes the root of passion twice.
Teach me the hidden art that can revive
words that fall through hairline cracks
in the paper’s ice. Or let me levitate
over the page straight towards you,
leaving not one footprint of ink. Raindrops
thud upon shingles, flooding the earth in remorse.
Listen. The sea grows silent as it winds
dream-thin waves around itself like a mummy cloth.
The last light too is about to give out.
The candle is a grave-digger who buries
his own corpse at the bottom of the wax.
In Memory of the Western Ghats
Chorus of chainsaws
heard above
wingbeat, whistle, and whir.
Then eerie silence.
The forest would have stood up
and clapped vigorously
if it had not been an amputee.
Corpses of trees
floating downstream—
arborescent Ophelias
wearing wilted green smiles
in rigor mortis.
The heart of stone
cut out from highlands—
has it stopped beating already?
Cities flourish the way
hair and nail
persevere in hermetic graves:
the transplant is a tremendous fail.
Shiny new roads
with aposematic white stripes
warn elephant herds
against trespass.
Where calves once romped about,
fences issue restraining orders.
Tunnels that claw their way
through the bowels of the earth—
do they meander out of sight
to reappear in lurid nightmares?
Our shadows fall across rivers,
eclipsing their ebb and flow.
Sleepwalking rains
tip over the edge of whim
into daily doom.
The scorpion tails of excavators
glimpsed in a flash of lightning—
slow poison
injected into the flanks
of the Ghats,
bringing grandfather hills
down to their arthritic knees
on which generation after generation
was once dandled and put to sleep.
Maps of survival
torn up by human hands—
how can we redraw the boundaries
separating bounty from bane?
Sambhu Ramachandran is a bilingual poet, translator, short story writer, and academic from Kerala. He is currently working as Assistant Professor of English at N.S.S. College, Pandalam. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Bombay Literary Magazine (TBLM), Wild Court, Madras Courier, The Alipore Post, Muse India, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Setu, The Chakkar, Soul Poetry, The Ultramarine Review, and Sextet, among others.