Ecology by A K Ramanujan

By King Meera -
  • love-hate relationship with nature
  • speaker's love for mother (also family)
  • Questions given:
  1. Is the description of the mother similar to that of other Indian mothers?
  2. Is this poem about the conservation of nature?

The day after the first rain, 
Monsoon.
for years, I would home
in a rage,
Interesting. What are you so mad about, speaker?

for I could see from a mile away
From a mile away, on the way home
our three Red Champak Trees 
OUR three red champak trees
had done it again,
meaning they've done it before

had burst into flower and given Mother 
her first blinding migraine
first but not last; blinding because of the extent of the pain she's in in
of the season
these migraines last the whole season

with their street-long heavy-hung
yellow pollen fog of a fragrance
The pollen grains have made the air thick like fog - in fact the air IS yellow with it's heady scent
no wind could sift, 
the breeze cannot blow away this fog

no door could shut out
and the doors cannot keep it out either. the whole street in front of them is thick with it; it will seep in through the gaps
from our black-
pillared house whose walls had ears
and eyes,
begins personifying the house
scales, smells, bone-creaks, nightly
visiting voices, and were porous
pollen will get in through the holes
like us,
self-explanatory: we will breathe in this fog of pollen

but Mother, flashing her temper
like her mother's twisted silver,
giving the mother's anger some physical quality: shiny, radiant, expressive in her temper
grandchildren's knickers
soaked, then wrung (twisted)

wet as the cold pack on her head,
wet because she was sweating - cold sweats
would not let us cut down 
a flowering tree
Flowering tree. Religious significance. Bad omen.
almost as old as her, seeded,
she said, by a passing bird's 
providential droppings
Taken as a blessing - came from the sky

to give her gods and her daughters
and daughters' daughters basketsful
of annual flower
This^ is the extent of what this tree is good for.

and for one line of cousins
adower of migraines in season.
Burn!
(perhaps the pollen allergy is inherited?)

Notice that the whole poem is one single sentence - a spitting angry, sarcastic, cutting rant.

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