Here’s the sixth part of our ‘Birds of Chopta’ series – with the following seven birds and poems dedicated to each one of them. We hope you enjoy it.
Poems by Sourabha Rao. Photo courtesy shared below each image.
1. Black-and-yellow grosbeak
© Akbar Ali Asif
a new space within, swollen with rapture
the earth holds so much
and your responses rest within you – dense, vivid, your own
forming you as you participate in this great dialogue
the world’s altruism you can never understand
but this never is never a defeat
for there is a grosbeak, a gleaming gem against all of the sky
warm, tender, austere,
like the vast meaning of a word you still don’t know
2. Maroon oriole
© Senthil Murugan
marooned but not lost, in a scarlet silence
where your heart slows into a harmony
almost as if fumbling at this new, delicious threshold
a thrill, delicate and almost nervous against your skin
when you see the inky, fluid night and
skies of striking sunrises and sunsets thus cloak
a mountain ave
a bird is never just a bird
it is the world coming to you or taking you in its arms, as you would prefer
in so many ways
with all this beauty and all this vital torment
and more beauty
3. Verditer flycatcher
© Anupam Thombre
you feel its hold
not a trespassing
but an intimacy only distance enables
a conversation fills you up
you watch a shaft of light, pearly, illuminating it
a bird you are gawking at – bluesy, small
your disclosure of admiration, inelegant maybe to some
but searingly sincere, indifferent to indifference
it is flitting about
in its unrest, you settle
you suffer such moments of tremendous magic
from an otherwise place of refrain – your heart
a force suddenly falters and falters… and flies
the bird inside your ribs finds its blue sky
4. Streaked laughingthrush
© Jayanta Kumar Biswas
when your soul is streaked with beauty
it is hard to contain yourself
so you bloat with joy
and splinter and spill it
there is satiation
then more hunger for beauty
this is why there is many a bird song
thickets throbbing with them
places of rapture, unnamed, untamed, within you
and you, in them
you exist in this world
and the world, in you
such agonisingly simple miracle
5. Grey bushchat
© Nidhin Basheer
moments when you are owned by something else
say a bushchat, perched in peace
beauty branching out in you as joy, as lightness, so much more
what do you do with such sudden freedom? silver-grey and sacred
look up! all of the sky is looking at you, too
as if readying you to it
listen to the birdsong, breathe
there is air, and this – your breath
and in between, only some skin
6. Himalayan shrike-babbler
© Namita Keskar
and one would think that is a babbler and this is I
but that and this, all this mind babbling, fades into one thing – silence
if one stood a while longer before the ave and its curious head-turns
like it’s singing to you a lost song
of a common thread tying it and you into an us
our hearts, borrowed pieces of Earth
and you know it is never about narrow loyalties of me and mine
but of a larger one
only the heady freedom of deciding how large, is all yours
7. Small niltava
© Pradeep
what new blue skies form above your head
what new blue seas churn within you
when a niltava stirs a tree into unrest in its flitting
creaking open new windows and doors
welcoming new worlds, replacing the unhinged spaces of you?
a new orientation of sorts descends
when this world very world right before our eyes
retrieves lost versions of us, for us
some such restorations happen always, all too quietly
in Earth’s eternal, intimate, incessant dialogue with you
you only have to listen and see
it is that simple or that difficult
More:
Birds of Chopta - Week 1
Birds of Chopta - Week 2
Birds of Chopta - Week 3
Birds of Chopta - Week 4
Birds of Chopta - Week 5