Down to EARTHA: Vinita Agrawal’s Poetic Conversation with Nature
Vinita Agrawal takes the role of a ‘poetic journalist’ in Eartha, in verses that spark with compassion for all living entities on the planet.
In an illustration from the 2nd Century AD that Vinita Agrawal originally intended to use as an endpaper for her latest book of ecological poetry Eartha (Sahitya Akademi, 2024), three soothsayers interpret Queen Maya’s dream of birthing the Buddha. In what is perhaps the earliest available pictorial evidence of words being written in India, a scribe records the details of this dream. This illustration served as a muse for the themes of Agrawal’s collection, given the potency ascribed to grafting the hitherto unspoken: the voice of nature, and the voicing of dreams or prophecies throughout the book.
I spend longer than usual thinking about ways to describe Eartha. What’s so difficult, I ask myself? I love the poems, they resonate. And, then, after another day of going through the manuscript with the proverbial toothcomb, thinking about what messages the poems hold for me, trying to pick up clues from the rustle of the wind in the pines and the leaves of the apple trees, full green for miles around, realization dawns: Agrawal’s poems are not only beautiful, but painful, revelatory, and sometimes, just too sad for words. It is this sheer force of tragedy that has made it hard to confront the poems.
The truth, often, can be too difficult to bear.
With a dedication to “every living entity and to our Planet Earth”, Agrawal begins her journey and in the same breath, her conversation with Earth’s non-readers and readers alike. “For someone who loves nature,” she tells me, “it is natural to write about the devastation they see around them.” Identifying poetry as the vital vehicle for sensitizing the reader to the urgency of our times, Agrawal also cites words as “weapons of the right kind”. Make no mistake, this Goddess takes no prisoners—and she has many arms.
The hand at the end of the first of these arms wields an imaginary mic to interview the impoverished or ghosted creatures of our planet. Taking the role of poetic journalist, Agrawal converses with the (now extinct) Splendid Poison Frog: “Did the sun flicker / at your vanishing act?” In “Weight”, meanwhile, her questions falter, have no answer but silence, for the creatures she sets out to speak with have already departed for all time.
One afternoon, I said to myself,
“Why isn’t the sparrow hungry?”
The Sparrow is not hungry because there are no more sparrows.
I could drown in the darkness of sparrows.
Sometimes, the conversation takes the shape of a prayer: In “Forgive Me, Amur”, a plea to the Amur leopard, who is “about to join the nine hundred species we’ve lost. / Humanity’s worst crime.” Humanity does not evade karma for this crime. “Mankind itself is about to end,” she warns in “Message to the Species that have Gone Extinct.”: “If it wasn’t, I wouldn’t be writing this: / We wouldn’t be begging for forgiveness.”
Through the bleakness, there springs defiance and hope: for example, the Gingko’s “sapling flags of resilience” have sprouted in Hiroshima since the desecration of that earth. Jujube and Persimmon are “inventing a language of survival / seeds filled with hymns”. (“Hibakujumoku - Survivor Trees”). Reading these verses reminds me of how Chernobyl’s desecrated earth has been renewing itself constantly in the years of human abandonment following the nuclear disaster of 1986, as wolves, boars, bears and deer return to inhabit the forests of self-seeded Silver birch trees, and certain radiotrophic fungi continue to bring hope that even vast radioactive wastelands can revert—given enough time.
In the titular poem “Eartha”, the Goddess holds out her hands as healer: in a conversation with the Earth herself, Agrawal suggests wrapping a shawl around the planet’s wounded form. This simple act in itself poses difficulties: A shawl of shatoosh would involve killing antelopes, one made of angora, cause rabbits to “struggle just to breathe in cages”, a tigerskin would result in “four thousand years of tremours”, mohair and silk would entail the death of goat and silkworm, while a goosefeather quilt would necessitate the unnecessary slaughter of countless geese.
No, the poet decides: none of the above. We see the benevolent aspect of the Goddess holding the Earth as she would a child in another set of her all-powerful arms.
In “To Orchid”, the noun is compelled to action as we learn,
what it means to stay in the game
when roses and violets are wilting
…
to belt out stunning disclosures
when none were expected.
There is evidence throughout Eartha that we may need to develop a silent language to best communicate with those who have no words: “It’s enough / that the earth speaks to us without speech…” in a forest where “leaves croon birds to sleep”.
There is hope, too, of appropriate adaptation—imagine how it would feel to leopard, to hawkmoth, to alligator, to rhododendron!
Perhaps this is the answer to humanity’s sad quest for survival: the intelligence to play with and transform our language, to adapt it so that as many species as possible are granted greatest chances of survival? But then, what will there be once language is exhausted? “It’s the silence and softness of a forest,” imparts Agrawal, “that allows you to collect your thoughts.” There is evidence throughout Eartha that we may need to develop a silent language to best communicate with those who have no words: “It’s enough / that the earth speaks to us without speech…” in a forest where “leaves croon birds to sleep”.
Silence can also hold the aftermath of tragedy, when it is the void that follows the call of a bird now extinct. In “The last Call of the Kuai’i o’ o’’, a bird last heard in Hawaii in 1987 “is calling for a mate who will never come…” This sorrow leaves both poet and reader in “broken-hearted silence”, a grief of survivor’s guilt.
And so, here to save the world from dying of this broken heart, comes the Goddess holding her final and most potent weapon: the pen. As writer and spokesperson for our precious planet, Agrawal reminds us in “Let’s Do This”: “You and I are the earth’s voice its larynx / Let’s speak up […] / Let’s watch it come alive again.”
“Poetry,” Agrawal says, “must come from the heart and make an impact on the reader. That’s all that counts.”
The Goddess has the last word, for every poem in Eartha comes from this very place of compassion, the compassion that is one last vital call to act, repair and conserve our only home, the home of all the Earth’s many species in their multifarious, glorious diversity.
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Tansy Troy is an India-based educationalist, poet, performer, playwright and maker of bird and animal masks. She conceived and edits The Apple Press, a young people’s eco journal which features poetry, stories, articles and artwork. Tansy has published poetry, articles and reviews in The Hindustan Times, The Hindu, The Scroll, Punch Magazine, Art Amour, Muse India, Plato’s Cave and The Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English. Join her on the journey @voice_of_the_turtle and @the_adventures_of_tara.
