The Departed Nightingale

(This poem is a tribute to Madam Sugathakumari, Malayalam poet and an ardent environmentalist and advocate of women's rights. She passed away recently. Most, if not all, of the imagery in this poem belongs to her. I might have paraphrased.) After nightlong rain* the world stands in gloom. The fallen tree and the dead bird in the nest are sobbing deep inside my heart. That little girl in tatters at the roadside is awaiting her mom's return, dead long ago selling herself to the world. She is looking at the Moon and stars which man extends his hands shamelessly to capture and own, carrying the fire of hunger in her bowels, to grow into a victim of flesh-hunters in a morrow's nightmare. A world without mother, a world without father, A world that has now lost an elder sister to demand its rights, although the night rain has ceased, a world still wiping its tears. There was a landslide last night - the hut that disappeared in the mud, the fallen tree, the broken bamboo flute, all ask 'Oh Krishna, where do you hide? Don't you recognize down here the wailing ones? '** There beside them lay a jungle bird that sang my tongue***, extolled to the skies as the fluent one, as her name implies, Nature's eternal beloved. Like the moth that doesn't cease to love the flames that burn her wings, like a flower that selflessly offers all her petals in passion's fervour to the heartless tempest from the south, infatuated with the eternal Infinite, singing to It in full-thorated joy without end, our nightingale**** of poetic torrents. Oh ye, chant the Gayatri mantra*****, may the worlds she envisioned flower and sway like splendorous galaxies that yonder up in the skies flourish. __________________ *'Night Rain' is one of her celebrated poems. **She wrote in Malayalam, my native tongue. ***'Krishna Don't You Know Me' is another famous poem by her. ****She has translated John Keat's 'Ode To A Nightingale' into Malayalam. The work is memorably sweet. ****A famous, popular, ancient Indian mantra that calls out to the Creator whose divine effulgence illumines all realms - physical, mental and spiritual - to stoke our intellect.