• By Godheard King

In vain your brazen trumpets sound

sudden, warning strikes in my ears,

fruitlessly you brace my heartbeats

with the freezing pace of dreary tunes

I am the very earth you pound

with those groping feet that carry

your pillar-like legs, you, tetrachs

of the cold jungle men call life.

Must I rupture for your vibrations and trunk-shakes?

my future on the altar of meetings and agreements?

cold-blooded elephants! your ambles unearth me not

I remain the earth you walk, the earth you become,

home to millions of moans buried alive in me

to innumerable gold and blood in dust,

the ground to grass that sprouts evermore

spite your hill-huge figure and hefty gait.

Reckon me hence, treading softly in my fear

lest you falter to count your broken bones,

even your ivory tusks, sprawled out in my

brimming bowels, once I have yielded to

immerse you in my scorched womb

as underlying the tortoise’s mat in the old tale.

Flap your floppy ears to hear the wind whisper

my name in its utter nativity, ‘Boomika’

I am the earth, legion

for we are the raw sweat and sludge

of farmers scattered abroad in the sun,

it is time for reckoning us, the root of life

you dig up with your traitorous tusks,

the reddish carpet you swing your trunks over

in obeisance

and we are

no more the grass caught in your elephantine clash

no more the grass that become your battlefield.

Eterne, even when muddy, we make the glade mourn

its cries reverberating back from the future to the past

We are not the grass, but the earth

longing for untrammelled, unhalted stride;

We are the basket for dews glinting on grass

in the dawn of life and youth;

We are the earth and we will never die

in your selfish, beastly dance.