Tiger
by Keki N Daruwalla
The tiger isn’t burning bright
Either in shadow or in sun.
The tiger family is thinning
Two by two and one by one.
The tiger isn’t burning bright
In the forest of the night
Or in the wilderness of day.
We need to understand his plight.
The father Sheru’s missing now.
Sheru has been shot and skinned.
Poachers ground his bones to powder
For some Chinese medicine.
Bones would bring them power, they thought,
Put life into some sickly man.
Their souls were sick, killing tigers
Is something we won’t understand.
His skin is hanging on the wall;
His bones are packed in plastic white
And shipped out. A gecko on the wall
Is hunting insects on his side.
Once jungles trembled at his roar;
Tree tops flew – birds disappeared!
Monkeys screamed (what an uproar!)
Now geckoes nibble on his ear!
Lord God had stamped upon his skin
In equal stripes both night and dawn.
His black-and-gold won’t shimmer now.
Boar-hunter, Forest King – he’s gone.
The Listeners
by Walter de La Mare
Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest’s ferny floor:
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveller’s head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
“Is there anybody there?” he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely Traveller’s call.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
“Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even
Louder, and lifted his head: –
“Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word,” he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.
I Speak for Those with Orange Lunch Boxes
by Arundhathi Subramaniam
I speak for those
with orange lunch boxes,
who play third tree
in an orchard of eight in
the annual school play,
who aren’t headgirls,
games captains, class monitors,
who watch other girls fight for the seesaw
from the far wall across the sand-pit,
who remember everyone’s lines
but their own,
who pelt after the school bus
their mother’s breakfasts still heaving
in their gut,
who still believe
there’ll be exams one day
they’ll be ready for,
Those with orange lunch boxes.
I speak for them.
The Star
by Jane Taylor
Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are,
Up above the world so high,
Like a diamond in the sky.
When the blazing sun is set,
And the grass with dew is wet,
Then you show your little light,
Twinkle, twinkle, all the night.
Then the traveller in the dark,
Thanks you for your tiny spark,
He could not see where to go,
If you did not twinkle so.
In the dark blue sky you keep,
And often through my curtains peep,
For you never shut your eye,
Till the sun is in the sky.
As your bright and tiny spark,
Lights the traveler in the dark,
Though I know not what you are,
Twinkle, twinkle, little star.
The Way Through the Woods
by Rudyard Kipling
They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath,
And the thin anemones.
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.
Yet, if you enter the woods
Of a summer evening late,
When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools
Where the otter whistles his mate,
(They fear not men in the woods, Because they see so few.)
You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet,
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods …
But there is no road through the woods.
Excerpted with permission from I Stole A Little Lovely Dream, Talking Cub.
