An evocative, multilayered poem, by Prof Sonjoy, that celebrates the river, Nature and various aspects of grammar. An exclusive for Different Truths.

Can you punctuate a river in spate
As it springs in a torrent from its glacial plate
Avalanching its way down moss and clover?

Can a comma slow the rapids
Can we colon-ise the waters,
Semicolon its flow and dam it,
Block, control, trap and tap it?
Slow it down to a manageable pace
Bring a full stop to its wild wild race?

Using our syntactic we apostrophise the banks,
Leash the verbs, pronounce the ranks
Neatly arrayed in conjunctive lines
Of river walks and parks
clearly lined in stanzas and rhymes
Accomplishing the mission
Through levees commissioned
To stanza the rebellious waters
Contained, highlighted
Formatted, regimented.

Grabbed by grammar, ruined by rules
Sentenced and framed,
Occluded and schooled,
The river quietens its course,
Indulges the fools,
Gently laps at its banks, twirls its whirlpools,
In quiet surrender, contains its force.

Till

The sky bursts in rain
The Himalayan glaciers melt
In the wild dance of an angry God
Ganga descends on the plains
In avalanche, torrent, and swirling rapids
Damning the dams, banishing the banks
Flooding the grammar and its ranks
An infinite watery vast
Wipes out city lines, lanes and bylanes
Bungalows cottages and huts
Villa and chalet, rhyme and reason,
There are no ifs and buts.

The boundless waters break all bounds
Of stanzas, paras, sentenced lines,
Simple, complex and compound.
In demoniac speed the voracious waves
Consume the meters, swallow the breaks
Ravage all the riverine pathways
Bloat up the ponds and the lazing lakes
Blurring the bends of the grammarian’s stakes

Unstoppable, the waters swamp and race
In a devastating, maddening pace
To a salty frothy consummation
Through a triangular delta’s mangrove maze
To a vast oceanic release
Where noun and verb, meter and rhyme
Do whatever they please
In endless games of waves and ripples
Dancing in the sunlight’s trails
Into the horizon’s deep entrails
Where sky meets the adverbial sails
And the sun in a farewell exclamation hails!!

Deep in the sanded and silted catacomb
Metaphors, metonyms and symbols grow
As narratives of flood into the ocean flow
The earth’s imagination lies seeded in its womb
Fruits flowers in succulence ripen
Pomegranates gourds, shamrock and lichen
Patterns of orchards, bush and bracken
Ferns nettles cones and acorns
Strewn across the grammar highway
As symbols and indicators thicken.
Drunk on rhododendron and mahua wine
Words in melodious echoing lilts
The plains and hills in magic entwine.

Photo from the Internet