L'esprit de l'escalier

Photo by  Jeffrey Czum  from  Pexels The Matchbox House  By Swadha Rawat   Struck a match Or in this case, well more than a few: A bubbling vat of oil, a hunk of smouldering charcoal and Another shovelful of hard, dark coal fuel. Covered your ears, breathed in the smoke: Wispy strands and dissipating tendrils caressing your hair.   Set a clock, and forgot, that it was ever there. A decade, two, three and four Then struck it with a baseball bat when the buzzing alarm wouldn’t stop. Eyes still closed, In a slowly warming up room: stifling, festering, irrevocably altering. The ice starts dripping down, pooling round the refrigerator But the taps run dry, coated with a fine layer of corrosive acid. (Entire biomes lost, entire species gone, entire livelihoods lost to the seemingly inevitable crawl of time.)   It was not inevitable, it could be stopped But still the man in the room lies, half asleep, deaf to his own wheezes,...

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 ...