Two Poems by Sarah Das Gupta
Listening to the Landscape The trees speak the language of my birth, they bend to its sonorous syllables. In autumn gales they resort to 'boom' and 'doom.' The coppiced hazels in the orchard whisper, 'shush' and 'swish' in answer to the scented wind of summer. The ancient hills in rocky enclaves, speak the old tongues of Celt and Saxon. On wild, winter nights, the wind roars along rugged crests, muttering the speech of clashing swords and flying arrows. The cliffs, chalky white, red sandstone, grey granite, echo to storms rolling in from the sea. Angry consonants sound in fury, rebounding the faces of would-be enemies. In dreams, I build words, phrases with that vocabulary which sculptures and molds the landscape, waking and living, those letters and sounds interpret, vocalize my inner silence. Cemeteries are quiet places, the dead lie silent. Yet they live on in the language they wrote and spoke, in which they would formed and which, with the hills, t...