A Jungle Trying To Escape

Just before the spring makes way to summer

and the rains coming next in full force

I like to be in the backyard of my house.

In the fifty long years the trimmed grass

where children played

has given way to unkempt weeds and saplings,

and survivalist plants.

It can't be called a garden

but it still has a character

all its own.

Here the plants and saplings have their reign.

They decide where to grow and when,

and once they have chosen their places

they stubbornly stay.

Try what you can, they will not budge.

We bow to their will and let them grow

We are open now to their capricious games,

the games they play to tease

us and the birds.

To our astonishment, one fine summer we saw

the corner at the far end

had turned into a rich grove of mango trees.

A few years thence with no specific care or nurture

it started to blossom at its own sweet will.

The saplings of palms and coconut trees

have grown up to tell their own stories

of Goa and Konkan from where they came and settled here.

On some stormy nights when the sky is crossed by wind and clouds

and the sudden streaks of scary lightning,

the hints of the storm to come,

they start to whisper with one another in a hissing sound.

They would not let us sleep, with the sounds

of the branches crashing down with a fury,

and the whole night the drama would go

alternating between a spell of silence

and the battling noise of sound and fury.

It's a veritable jungle now;

A jungle trying to escape the fences

made by crumbling walls and boundaries

washed away in the water- logging by the rains.

Sushama Karnik.