You don't have people now
who can sense a drought
from the way frost crinkles
on the ground in February,
a leaf leans into the wind,
or the miasmal drift
of plume-grass or burst bulrushes.
Hence this surprise today
at the tracery of earth-cracks
seen through blackened stubble.

It was sixty years back, and I a child,
terrified, as he stood at our door,
tribal-dark and thick-lipped.
God had riveted his bones well,
for they didn't fall apart,
ankle, knee and hip-joint
angling out of his parchment skin.
He was still and silhouette-black;
even his eyes didn't move as I ran in.
Mother, churning her butter-milk,
asked me to give him a tumbler.
Gingerly 1 held out a clay urn
lest our fingers touched.
He drank and left, soundless,
a vision creeping away
from a hardening eyeball.

Later there were thousands;
footsore hordes scouring the land for forage,
numerous enough to start a tiger-beat
in every nullah. And herds,
first camels and then goats
which hugged the stems with forepaws
and nibbled away, till the trees
were left only with a green head of hair.
Well, the wheel's come full circle, as they say.

Do you see trains steaming out,
ten thousand frying on the lurching roofs?
It is our carts rolling today,
our villages walking out with their headloads
an ant-line following
the scent of a moist root.