‘Mountains too are equal to men’: In these poems, the personal has a ripple effect on the world

Surrender

If I were a country, you would be a journalist
And because you are not an
empty-headed bloke out for a quick fix
but investigative, committed, idealist,
I would have shot you down a street
and left you to bleed.

If I were a country and you my journalist
it would be a civil war, one too many
revolutions –
changes in governments.
I would have jailed you
and kept you under CCTV.

If I were a country and you my journalist
I would have played a wait-and-watch game
to see who wears the other
sleep-deprived akin to a Russian sleep experiment.

But the more you stare, the more beautiful someone becomes, remember?

Many passed the cellars of my mind
few, the cellars of my heart.

I would blink first.

I would give in
from dictatorship to democracy.

If I were a country and you my journalist
I would let you run a free press and media

to change the face of an
entire nation.

Confluence

Waters when they evaporate, meet…
at a global conference, to speak of fish dropouts,
obscura of clouds, near-deaths, hydrological dynamics,
monocultures, and metals:
nickel, lead, chromium, at their beds.

The bend is notional: water for coffee, cane,
banana, paddy,
mills, distilleries,
fertilizer plants.

The Aral Sea was water for cotton
in Uzbekistan:
one shirt drinking 2000 liters,
now more saline than the Dead Sea –
palm-sized, a fossil-tiger’s footprint,

plains of salt, toxic dust storms,
fishing towns, now ship-graveyards.
people, sick; dumps of pathogenic weapons
making the summers hotter, winters colder,
the Aral Sea is the Aralkum desert.

And if seas made maps,
rivers, homes
men, borders.

The Cauvery too is uprising
– one of the longest-running rivers
over her water share to ripple greens
for Karnataka and...

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