A Requiem for Amazonia

amazon fire 7

Amazon burns
Each flame licks a life
Each ember leads to strife

How will man survive?

From the meat roasted by the flames
That rise as if from Earth’s insides?

The birds that no longer fly
Lie roasted, toasted, drained of colour.

The brilliant macaw with its plumes of blue and yellow,
The golden monkey that leaps from tree to tree,
The green frog that hops,
The slithering snake that crawls
Now all lie in a heap
Under the dead burnt leaf.

70, 000 fires that cindered
The green to a dun, dull grey…
Devoid of life
Like Mordor, the ground cries.

Will only the Orcs abide
The dead — can they rise?

During the last reckoning what will they say?

Childhood has ended and we hold the Earth in our sway?

The last child crumbles away…

Mitali Chakravarty’s poetry has appeared online, as part of two anthologies, ‘In Reverie’ (2016) and ‘An Anthology of Indian Poetry in English’ (1984). She has published a humorous book of essays on living in China where she spent eight years, ‘In the Land of Dragons’ (2014); translated a short story, ‘Full Circle’, by the erstwhile Nabendu Ghosh, a Bengali writer and Bollywood scriptwriter, which was published in a collection called ‘That Bird Called Happiness ‘(2018). She had numerous bylines in The Times of India, Hindustan Times and The Statesman in the 1980s up to 1992. She has been reviewing books, and writing essays for kitaab.org from 2017. This April, she joined kitaab.org as the editor. She blogs at 432m.wordpress.com. She is working on her first two novels and  translating another novella by Nabendu Ghosh from Bengali to English. 


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