‘I am the Mighty, Ancient Himalaya / Carve me at your peril’: Six poems about rebooting the planet

We are escaping the smog once again. This is becoming an annual pilgrimage. As the early morning train chugs myopically through a land of shifting shadows and ghosts, the sun, at last, bursts through. Since it rose, a monochrome train-track to nowhere has been punctuated by pylons.

I pass out in defiance, as if my psyche refuses to include this human-induced void, this avoidable catastrophe into my stream of conscious thought. Yet can I really escape it? How much of my creative life is now affected by it, how many poems has the insidious smog crept its way into? Too many.

When I come around, through the train window, a glistening. We are passing over water, like a yogi with steel feet. White glimmer then vast shining, illumination. Perhaps this is all there is at the end, a vast grey expanse, a wan sun shining dull white in an extinguished sky.

My friend and I are discussing things. It seems that the state of the Earth is all we writers talk about these days. Did you see, I ask her, did you watch the Booker Awards last night? And hear the words of winner when her novel was announced? She said that though we are all made up of star stuff, we are also made of earth stuff, making our responsibility to Earth and to ourselves tantamount to the same thing. Yes, Anna replies. The world is turning. Spurred largely by Gaia crumpling to her knees to inspire our compassion. So tolerant of her when she could just shake us all off in a heartbeat.

My friend is right. We have so much for which to thank this gigantic energetic field that holds us here, in spite of collective ignorance, treachery. And every article, every book, every poem written in Her name, every tribute and homage deserves the space to stand up and be counted. When I wonder aloud if it’s ok to write about the same thing as everyone else, another wise writer replies: It’s a big room.

A big room in which to write about a big Earth.

The train pulls in to a small station, somewhere at the end of a line. We get into a car and drive. We reach the end of the road and there is no more concrete, just a bridge over a river and a footpath into the forest. Two great Indian hornbills do a ceremonial welcome dance from a treetop. There are fresh traces of wild elephant scat and newly-printed pug marks of a passing leopard. Still we walk, deeper and deeper into grassland, treeland. A well-camouflaged wall-climber shows us how we too can blend into our surroundings if we are still and watchful.

When we reach the further shore of the river, in which hundreds of golden maasi frolic and bask in this late autumn light, I sit on a stone, take out my pen and notebook. A poem, a book of poems, seems the very least I can offer. May With Earth as My Witness inspire a thousand more.

– Tansy Troy’s Author Note

Peepul Sutra

My roots stretch further back in time than his:
like the earth he touched to bear witness,
I too remember.

My cordate, drip tip shape pre-dates his enlightenment
by millennia; I recall the moment as if I always knew
it would happen, always guessed it would be under me.

Look, look at how my myriad green fingers
point to earth, each saying here!
Beneath our leaves, it happened.

Our collective whisper transcends
individual voice, recognising in our multitude
a canopy of multiple presents, continued ad infinitum.

Our elegant departure from that green perfection,
island hopping between filigree veins,
replicates his beauteous form as he too grew skeletal.

You could see right through him, yet his structure stayed intact.
Strong as spiders’ lines upholding –
this mystery of dissolution.

Abe Le: A Tribute

for my Mother-in-Law, Abe le, last Queen of Testa Kha

No need to light a thousand butter lamps,
I am already lit!
Passed so swiftly from this shell,
hard-worked until my bones and limbs
and mind were numb and outworn.

The heated brick I sat on for relief,
the wooden pillow where I rested my head
all these hard comforts gone cold now.

Elated to be at last released
from under the weight of turquoise crowns
and heaviness of clod;
free from reams of antique barley,
rotting in the store.

No longer beholden to witless generations.
No more the gatekeeper of an unacknowledged realm.

I return to cobalt sky,
to a wilderness of rock,
to the ceaseless torrent,
to the stealth of ice.

My peace was only ever masked
by walking stick
and failing words
and unfamiliar action.

Released from endless wait for sons,
slowly trekking home.

Mist Mountain

in memory of those who lost their lives in the Manali monsoon floods of 2023

Enchanted forest of fairies’ tales,
our village sits snug in you, level with cloud:
are we forgiven for feeling celestial?
Can it be helped if basking in half-sun
like waterlogged butterflies, we too recall flight?

Flooding the media,
every tale a torrent
of mud churned up as a charnel ground,
of souls wrangled out of depth.

We left a moment before the skies broke loose
and the mountain came crashing down.

Did She mean to tell us something?
To say stop! Gutting me,
wretched as a trout,
dissecting me as jadugars
saw in half their girls:

I am the Mighty,
Ancient Himalaya.
Carve me at your peril.

Fear the boom of your smooth road
plunging to the abyss

Horses of the Dilli Apocalypse

When the storm has finished wreaking
and everything’s reduced to rubble,
who cares for you, sweet horses
of the Dilli apocalypse?

When the ogres have ceased puffing
a noose of smoke round village huts,
squeezing life out of myriad lungs;

and the sun’s a sullen apology,
a rupee lost on the forsaken street of sky,
who will love and groom you then,
feed you succulence?

Every forgeable leaf is encased
in shrouded dust, grey mud.
Dammed and stinking Yamuna thick
with whitish scurf and scum.

Not a single vulture left to pick clean
your starved bones.
Jackals barely visible
amongst the detritus.

For now, you survive,
witnesses to holocaust.

When you’re gone,
may your proud ghosts bite,
pawing the earth,
impoverished dirt,
back to fierce life.

Beginning of Compassion

A lightning bolt
splits open your head
and now you have eleven of them
twenty-two eyes weeping blood
to see the suffering upon suffering
as the Unrealised all pour back
the moment they’ve been freed.

Each of your tears hits the flame-ravaged earth,
to manifest as a new-born goddess
battling for the species.

We grieve the passing of the wise ones,
the living of the live ones,
tracing our way through seven rings of trash
back to the centre where Mount Meru stands,
the ragpicker children searching her pockets
on their infernal hunt.

We emerge, tear soaked, gut wrenched,
to see the blessedness of maggots.