Reading Time: 2 minutes
Ritamvara, an essential Romantic at heart, identifies with lush greenery of nature. In this prose-poem, she travels from the external world into the meditative silence within her; from the din of the City of Joy, her hometown, to the ‘untouched’, ‘unpruned’ greenery of the mountains, the Himalayas.
The fever breaks in. I wonder how it is: if, I speak like the moaning bright green sea, the sea which strangely drinks from my spirits. It is blood thirsty tonight. The green teams with every form and swallows a bucket of purple. It is strange how the birds have fallen silent as the green of the hills move along to form an endless tryst with the green sea. The greenery of the mountains and the sea climbs my melancholy. It silences the ringing bird songs of my heart, springing uncountable leaks, I remain untouched, unnoticed.
Flitting across, the silent leaves jewelled with brilliant splatter of rain. I wonder how it’s to be touched by the untouched green. I hear the tinkles of the lights, innumerable across your chest of green. The clouds begin to break up their stories, aggressive at times, or rather silent, it colours the valley with its silent tooth bites.
I never try to make a jump, nor, do I feel, anything can be shorter than this. The privacy of my inner parts take a ripened course hanging from the green fresh twigs. The birds plummet across my newly formed fruits swishing the uninhabited island. They visit me. The exposed parts flaps like the dark, rough and gnarled parts of the oak tree full of experience in its undistinguished shaggy do.
I watch the antique Buddhist flags fluttering against the pensive green. The hopes crown the crest of green foliage. I hope to hope that the delicate breeze restores the battle of survival of the dense antediluvian forests. I dream that the humble shrub or weeds grow and reign as giants of the entire green kingdom. The fossil of the dead plants reckoning, the testimony of an abandoned shelter (three-storied lush apartment) in the heart of somewhere called the City of Joy.
I realise joy resides not in the palm, hand-crushed, but in the untouched, unpruned greenery.
©Ritamvara Bhattacharya
Pix from Net.
