L'esprit de l'escalier

Modern Day Superheroes By Swadha Rawat   Photo by  Anna Shvets  from  Pexels Our generation Grew up watching Superman take flight over film reel And flipping the worn pages of Iron Man comics. Hearing cries of “Avengers Assemble” And dreaming of bat mobiles that rumbled through smoky streets. Recalling tales of super human legends: Of Hercules’s Labours that numbered twelve And Vishnu’s popular incarnations that ten times here dwelled. Today, though People are piled up in hospitals Coughing fits, and shivers, Ventilators, blankets and bodies clutter the halls. You and I, most likely, Are sequestered in our homes, hands slathered with sanitizer And watching the tally on our phones. On the frontlines, today, There dwell, modern day, real superheroes More alive than any of our books or movies or dusty tales of old. Helping others breath At the expense of their own. In the light bleached corridors and The creaking metal beds of the hospital floor, Beeping monitors and ra...

Narrating Nature By Swadha Rawat    A Short Note on this Poem  5th June is World Environment Day and in this time of reckless consumerism, rampant pollution and strictly online activism, the question looming over us is : what will the environment and nature and all this biodiversity look like for our children? Will it still exist? I'm sixteen and for almost half my life, the go to thing I'd watch was Animal Planet or National Geographic. I grew up watching Bindi the Jungle Girl and on my tenth birthday, instead of celebrating it, I wanted to go to an animal sanctuary and see what tigers looked like out in the wild, not through a screen.  I could go to Ranthambore National Park and see nature but can the next generation, or the one after that? The Convention on Biological Diversity concluded that up to 150 species are lost everyday. Yes, even today. Even on World Environment Day. The reality is bleak. Our water is polluted, our air unbreathable, our forests are ...