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, they shaped too.

View Points

From Space

The Earth below

united from space

dreams realized

That dark sphere

floating in infinity

infinite possibilities

All scars healed

All jagged lines straight

Resolution

A small globe hurled by a Titan

Twisting, turning through space

No goal no target

No victims

From Earth

To the ant

A blade of grass

Is green space

To a hungry dog

Its plate of scraps

Has cosmic dimensions

To a forget-me-not petal

The patch of garden

Looks infinite

To the benighted peasant

The city lights

Loom on far horizons

To stranded astronauts

The Earth is

All they desire

To the wealthiest

The most powerful

The world

Is not enough

Sarah Das Gupta is a writer from Cambridge UK who has taught in India, Tanzania and UK.  She began creative writing aged 80, after an accident which limited her walking to a few meters.  Her work has been published in over 25 countries in anthologies and magazines.  She has been nominated for Best of the Net, The Pushcart and a Dwarf Star.