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.
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