Perma-flooded
The game bores me.I cannot name the bubbles any longer.
This underneath, this below, sea,
remind me what have drowned,
wrecked and gone.
From the rooftop, I see
the bottom of a newspaper boat;
afloat, rocking. This way
we exchange messages back and forth.
We – I and I;
we – the refugee and the one sank;
we – the one water-gazing and the other
hating the land as if memory
is the last fistful of dirt cast on the coffin.
I read the boat, the tales and news
about the leaders drowned and
the leaders emerging,
about the birds above the mountains
that survived, price people pays for being alive,
and about their faith, instead of dwindling,
standing as a lone reed.
I cannot ask anything to a boat,
albeit I writhe to know about the rose bush.
“Fool, you cannot, cannot eschew
blue and see the red, perchance dead,
that your mother has planted.
How can it outlast the tsunami even?”
I ask my boredom.
There stands no house, although, in sooth,
roses do not exist to ornament
the yards of the houses.
The trouble with the evolution is,
you are not trained for it.
You calculate the chances, but the ‘n’
ganders, and seems too infinite.
I swim up, touch the boat’s dissolving bottom,
tap, rap, dot, dash, dot, dash.
Alive and dead are alike now, and the ocean
stills the noise, tides and ebbs,
goes on as the meanings shed.
Author Note: This poem is written about the predicted grim situation in 2030 when my city, beloved city, may be under the water.
Kushal Poddar is a widely published poet, visual artist, and editor. The author of the Ice Floe Press collection, Postmarked Quarantine (https://icefloepress.net/postmarked-quarantine-a-book-of-poems-by-kushal-poddar/) Kushal has eight other books to his credit. He is a journalist, father, and the editor of ‘Words Surfacing’. His works have been translated into twelve languages.
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