Narmada Maha Kavya (mantra one)

(New draft. A sixth canto).

1.

The landscape here is one
of dreamless sleep,
of stark blue reverie and dry cloud.
The murmured smile
of the plow
turns warm brown
thoughts comfortably over,
and over beneath the lush
spread sexuality
of the trees.

``This fight, this crucial war...’’

2.

In Kheda Balavadi
the earth is good
and lived upon.
The children of a hundred families
smile, and the women are
beautiful, strong.
This is not idealism—
human life works here,
surprising as an old watch
found ticking
beneath the dust.

``We farm, we eat, and live happily. The land is so fertile that everything grows, and with ardour.’’

3.

The farmers have worked the land
here two hundred years
from Rajastan,
and Aadivasi tribes take fish
herbs and roots just as they have
a thousand years upon Narmada’s banks.
Unified,
their pulse is the rush of the river,
their flesh, Narmada sand,
and their only age is the turn of the
season, from rain,
to crop, to rain
again. It is their land.

``Never shall we leave this river, the river that courses through our veins, on whose banks we
dance and sing.’’

4.

June riverbeds are empty.
The dry days in the thick
of summer burn
and bloom together,
compassionate and cruel
as a mother’s palm against
a fresh wet wound.
They plow the land,
nervous
as any lover who has found
his goddess
to be a cheat.

``I can feel the dam being built, continuously, in my heart.’’

5.

For fifty years
the government’s been building
dams out of millstones
bound to rural feet,
as modernity cries
Widespread Water Scarcity!
Austerity Yields Prosperity India
Majestic, Free!
And there has been silence.
The fifty seven million moved
by the Narmada waters lifted
are too parched to speak,
as export cottons blush bloody tongued, smug.

``There is drought in Narmada, after the dam. Multinationals are being invited in openly; the
politicians have become puppets in their hands.“

6.

The landscape here is one
of dreamless sleep – the sleep
of the hopeless. Their soles
fall flat on dry Narmada’s sands.
She is their mother, their giver.
Scales of mud catch and scatter
from their feet with a sound
just audible to her.
She is a spark, not a flower.
Beneath the shrieking of cicadas,
beneath the sun-burnt saris clung
damp to the skins of these women
whose story is up, she sings
songs dry as tinder
of the coming of rain.

This poem belongs to the people of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada Movement)
— these are their words; it was my promise to bring them to you.
Interviews and research with the NBA was done in and near Kheda Balavadi, Madhya Pradesh,
India, in 2001.
Quotes from Devram Kanera, Shitaram Hirgi, and the poet, Vishtar. The villages discussed were
submerged by the Mann dam during the monsoon of 2002.
For more information visit www.narmada.org .