Skip to main content

Bark - Poem

Bark can appear barren. But when you go closer, things start moving, its pieces start shifting. So much life lives hidden in its interstices, or garbed with its looks. This is a poem celebrating these rugged vertical landscapes.


Bark

Bark, you call me,
I am a biome by myself,
a stretch of sheer curvature,
a tree's unique signature,
the very meaning of texture.


Abode of a diverse creature community,
lichen-tatooed, moss-draped,
fringed by fern, singed by fungi.
I am life whether I stand or lie,
pressed on Earth or bridged to sky,
home to bark-gecko, bark-mantis, bark-beetle, bark-others,
who wear my looks and garb my features,
I'm a basking spot for snakes and lizards,
grooming post for elephants and leopards,
nesting place of wasp, shield-bug and spider,
snack bar of barbet, nuthatch and woodpecker,
ladder and staircase for vine and creeper,
morning hideout for many a midnight creature,
a squirrel playground and katydid podium,
a civet haunt and cicada stadium.

Rough to flower's softness,
dark to canopy's brightness,
grain to bud's tenderness,
contortion to leaf's even-ness,
a gallery of hidden-ness.
Above's around, within's without,
I ooze, I flake, I crackle, I make.

Kneel near me.
Press your palm and cheek to tree-skin.
Know what it is to be bark?
Full of shapes and faces,
and unrevealed places?
Run your fingers along my interstice-scape,
shade over my jig-saw maze,
peer into my cracks,
peel into my gaps,
submerge in barkness.
What stories do you read?
What secrets do I reveal?
-M.Yuvan

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Milkweed Community

Throw it in the most derelict corner of the town, in the most utterly impoverished conditions you can find where few plants have managed to barely sprout, and the Giant Milkweed will grow forth royally. From right within a landfill, or beside the stench of an open sewer, through the dilapidated ruins of broken brick and concrete, amidst the blue-metal stones by railway tracks or from a crevice on a compound wall, there are a few places Milkweed is unwilling to rise from. Its grit and versatility are quite remarkable to note, yet it survives not by propagating itself rapaciously, dominating over all the other vegetation. It is no Prosopis, even though its hardy. The Milkweed instead exists in abundance together with all the other plants, never seeking to take over the land for itself. It co-habits and thrives. The latex which flows through the milkweed’s veins is well known to be highly poisonous, but that’s only to our stomachs and to cattle and other grazing mammals. A number...
Post a Comment
Read more

Fungi - Poem

Fungi transformed in our imaginations after the Wood wide web was discovered and described by the forest ecologist Suzanne Simard. And later powerfully evoked by writers like Peter Wohlleben and Robert Macfarlane. We now know that they connect forests, live in the ocean's depths and thrive in nuclear waste where nothing else can live. Their structures and lives confound our understanding. Their presence on the planet is almost all pervasive, that the dominion of any other life on here turns illusory as we study fungi more deeply. This poem is written from astonishment, terror, enchantment and a range of other feelings fungi can conjure. Fungi Let me throw you a riddle. Us, I, all of me. Bedrock, sky, all in between. Big, bigger than any dinosaur. Deep, deep as ocean floor. Life and life's reverse, death and death's converse, comprehension's curse, webwork, network, sub-soil universe. Underland's ancient internet, Underground's riddle-vers...
Post a Comment
Read more

Palaash Blossoms and Rosy Starlings

Palaash Blossom and Rosy Starlings If not every day, then during every transiting month, the human being who pleasures in taking long walks and communing with the landscape, has something or the other to anticipate excitedly. March is almost upon us and the Palaash trees everywhere are full of buds, making their branches sag. Very soon, when one looks up one morning, they would have suddenly bloomed altogether, overnight. And the tree would then bear not a sole leaf. Not a tinge of dark green would be seen on its crown, for it would have replaced every single one of them with its tongue like kesari-orange flowers curling towards the sky. From a distance, with some imagination on my part, the tree could well be a titan’s arm reaching up with his palm spread wide, his crooked fingers dripping with magma, having broken through the crust. The roads and walkways below are carpeted. The canopies of the smaller trees around are topped. Its flowers bob all along the shores of a pond...
Post a Comment
Read more