THE TAMARIND TREE Poem by E.V. Ramakrishnan

You are the nearest we ever had
to a native manifesto.

An annual convention of parrots
on the sea-routes of the sky.

In your book of beginnings,
an earthworm speaks of how the rain began.

Your roots exhumed bodies from ponds.
Our past has never been the same.

You meet the south-west monsoon
on equal terms, in an uprising of rain.

Like a parenthesis that pre-empts the sentence,
you are a parallel world of slowness and light.