We move in an enormous world at a pace so fast that we often miss out on noticing the little beings on this planet. World Ozone Day falls on September 16, and this year the motto is ‘Global action for a cooler planet’.
We must remember that smaller creatures are more vulnerable to UV rays. In ‘Characteristics of Life’ by Camille T Dungy, the poet says,
‘I speak for the damselfly, water skeet, mollusk,
the caterpillar, the beetle, the spider, the ant.’
Dungy makes a powerful statement: I speak from the time before spinelessness was frowned upon. The poet tries to bring in the necessity to look at nature with mindfulness, and inhabit a world where creatures like moon jelly and nautilus live and simply be. The poem etches the names of the oft-forgotten creatures to highlight the fact that our lives are partial, while we miss out on half of the universe in our daily affairs.
‘I move as the currents move, with the breezes.
What part of your nature drives you? You, in your cubicle
ought to understand me. I filter and filter and filter all day.’
The poem moves away from the grandeur of nature to show the significance of the forgotten. It is also a reminder to the human world not to measure on the basis of quantitative judgements alone. Gauging the world through the lens of glorious output and voluminous productivity is not the norm of the nature. The sun and the moon shines upon every tree, irrespective of its fruition.
‘I can be beautiful
and useless if that's all you know to ask of me.
Ask me what I know of longing and I will speak of distances
between meadows of night-blooming flowers.
I will speak
the impossible hope of the firefly.’
The stanza form of the poem reflects the erratic, drifting and unhurried movements of the creatures with whitespace and staggered line breaks. As a snail hesitates before pulling back into its shell or a caterpillar cautiously climbs the stem, or the damselfly jumps from one patch to the next, the poem goes placidly in its way, while jolting our senses in its very essence with emotional and logical pauses in between.
‘You with the candle
burning and only one chair at your table must understand
such wordless desire.’
‘To say it is mindless is missing the point.’
The writer is a poet, translator and assistant professor of English at BCM College (Autonomous), Kottayam