To the Indians who Died in Africa - T S Eliot

 To the Indians who Died in Arica – T S Eliot

 

The man’s destination is his own village,

His own fire, and his wife’s cooking;

To sit in front of his own door at sunset

And see his grandson, and his neighbour’s grandson

Playing in the dust together.

 

Scarred but secure, he has many memories

Which return at the hour of conversation,

(The warm or the cool hour, according to the climate)

Of foreign men, who fought in foreign places,

Foreign to each other.  

 

A man’s destination is not his destiny,

Every country is home to one man

And exile to another. Where a man dies bravely

At one with his destiny, that soil in his

Let his village remember.

 

This was not your land, or ours: but a village in the Midlands,

And one in the Five Rivers, may have the same graveyard.

Let those with a common purpose, action 

None the less fruitful if neither you nor we

Know, until the judgement after death,

What is the fruit of action? 

                 ----

Ecology - A K Ramanujan

 Ecology – A K Ramanujan

 

The day after the first rain,

for years, I would come home

in a rage,

 

for I could see from a mile away 

our three Red Champak trees 

had done it again,

 

had burst into flower and given Mother

her first blinding migraine

of the season

 

with their street-long heavy-hung

yellow pollen fog of a fragrance

no wind could sift,

 

no door could shut out from our black-

pillared house whose walls had ears 

and eyes,

 

scales, smells, bone-creaks, nightly

visiting voices, and were porous 

like us

 

but Mother, flashing her temper 

like her mother’s twisted silver,

grand children’s knickers

 

wet as the cold pack on her head,

would not let us cut down 

a flowering tree

 

almost as old as she, seeded,

she said, by a passing bird’s

providential droppings

 

to give her gods and her daughters 

and daughters’ daughters basketfuls 

of annual flower

 

and for one line of cousins

a dower of migraines in season.

 

               ---