Green Poetry by Sumana Roy

Green

Future is a dead country. Its flag stripes
of vomit green. Green is an anthem we hear
when old lovers return with swollen cacti skin. Tiger
is a fable: hiccups of black on a golden sun. Love’s
a leafless tree – eleven velvety parrots fly to the silence of sin.

Sunlight, half-ripe yellow, sneezes like a cow. Hushes
of its droplets lick the feet-crushed forest floor. Green
was a whisper-soft spring leaf you rolled into my
ear. Green was a vein asking for traffic below chin.
Green was superstition – snot, lust circus, wreath piping.

Green comes late, like love for those who are not
of our blood. It seeps out of feet like crabs at a railway
crossing. Water shrinks – sweat from wells in collar bones.
Inks in clouds dry to the earth’s red-dust trampling. Fruit,
now a martyr, grows dimpled-black in the boy’s drawing.

Sumana Roy lives in the Chicken’s Neck, from where she witnesses, with nervous despair, green being turned into a museum in the houses of the rich. She’d like to believe that, in spite of all, the poor too shall inherit the green.