A Love Letter to Gaia - VL Muanpuia Pachuau

 

My unbeloved Gaia,
May the stars above light up your crimson heart;
You breathe your life through me,
And hard times I may meet, yet you provide,
Despite your unrequited love for me,
You waited, and waited for the pain to subside,
Please hear me before you fade into the night.

All my life, you have given me strength,
You filled my lungs with loving fairness,
Fed me your fruits of life and health,
Grew me up into what I am;
Through all those centuries you sheltered me,
Helped me survive through the end of days and time,
Oh, how can I ever forget your everlasting benign!

Broken is your body, enduring endless agonies,
Scars and aches I had inflicted on you,
My ears set on your screeches of cacophony,
Roaring tides of your tears, your rage imbues,
Your knees, bruised, your beauty, ruined,
Stranded and abandoned with your bloodstained wings,
Death comes knocking, total darkness it brings.

I had turned your singing daisies into ashes,
Fields of green engulfed by giant fire lilies,
Lilac skies turned black as your life flashes,
Your oceans suddenly brimmed with death;
But I am our future, I am our dying hope,
A responsibility that will save us our breath,
A light that flickers in the darkest of nights.

 Alas, I have opened my stitched eyes,
I am the past, I am here, I am alive,
As old ways should be buried and gone,
Restrained and bounded by the grim hands of the past,
Your dying arms will always be my home,
I am the future, I am there, I am your half,
For our spirits are one in the same.

Beneath the gleaming blue moon,
My figure shall sit beside your gentle glow;
Caress my broken soul of all troubles,
And I shall sing you melodies near the river's flow.
Forever may your heart be true,
And forever I shall love you.

VL Muanpuia Pachuau, 4th semester, turned to Greek mythology to come up with this beautiful love song to Gaia, the Greek goddess of the earth, which won him First Prize and a cash prize of Rs. 2000/-      Congratulations, Muanpuia! 

A printout of his poem hangs proudly on a wall at college.

Hear Mother Earth's Cry - Chawngthanmawia

Hey, can you hear the world cry?
Oh, it doesn't literally cry -
I doubt she would only cry
if she could.

Hey, can you hear the world weep ?
When animals are treated as second-class;
livestock is a slave term -
enslaving generations of a species.
Separating mother from child.
We should be kinder to those
less equipped to wield power.

That was what I interpreted in her long
ongoing non-existent wail.
If you have heard the world weep,
you must've looked around.
Kept quiet, undisturbed or secluded;
It really is hard to hear a cry so ethereal,
that it has to be conjured up.

For Mother Earth has no vocal chords
to wail, to cry, to throw tantrums.
We, humans, we anthropomorphized nature.
When nature gets erratic and lives get lost
we make it seem like it is crying;
and that we are the culprits.

It is true, we are the culprits.
We live in a world that feeds our manic consumerism -
exploiting nature without a second thought.
Every piece of cheap technology
is made with labor exploitation done far away.
Bauxite, Cobalt; the minerals that technology needs
are sold cheap, in places where interests collide
and no semblance of peace can ever be found.
Such are the fates of resource rich countries like the Congo.
Plastic and fossil fuel, staples of modern life
pollute the world with every purchase.

We may think we don't contribute to pollution,
but we do. Every single one of us!

Here lies the end.
We are at a time where climate catastrophe
is as plausible as nuclear annihilation.
Developing countries will bear the impact,
but so will the “First World”.
When we see the world suffering from freak weather
more and more so;
growing steadily everyday.

I have found that it wasn't Mother Nature that was crying.
We were the ones crying.
We have made our only home uninhabitable.
Mother Earth will survive, humans, humans may become extinct.
But such is life.
We will be the species written on the list of extinct ones,
only for there to be no one writing that list.

Spencer argued that the world is a world of
“survival of the fittest (strongest)”
which became the common slogan for our "victory"
in evolution.
But vain and shallow as humans are -
a species who had the gall to name themselves “wise ape”.
If you read the literature
there are people like Kropotkin
who argued that it was mutual aid
and cooperation in species;
that made life work.
Evolution was not “survival of the fittest”
but “survival based on cooperation”.
Hearing Mother Earth cry
should be a rallying call.

For everyone supports environmental movements;
But we are all far too busy
surviving in a late stage capitalist consumer world.

And the change we need is radical -
our everyday life right now contributes to the problem.
As Kropotkin pioneered socio-biology and evolutionary psychology,
his arguments were not for naught.
And we know now, to be humble.
Among all of nature.

Even humans are ecosystems of their own.
Gut bacteria would wreak havoc
if it was elsewhere in the body.
We are microcosms of life, and we rely on them to live.
It was never Mother Earth that was crying.
It was us, humans, we were making ourselves cry.
For we are a part of nature, that will never change.

Chawngthanmawia, our erudite 6th semester student who's into socialism and European philosophy, reached deep into his readings to come up with this piece which won him Second Place in the "Hear Mother Earth's Cry" writing competition.

Wishful Thinking - Lalnunfeli

 

Character defines the world
A person lives in 
If it is lost, all is lost,
And say about hope?
Wasn’t hope all that was left
In Pandora’s box when all evil flew out?
Wasn’t hope all that Prometheus has
When the avenger feasted on him?
Weren’t you all that I had?
Weren’t you all my hope
In which I put all my faith
To which I’d cling on till eternity?
Weren’t you my hope, for which
I sacrificed not material, but my thought, my mind?
How can I hope for better
When nothing of it remains?
How can I expect good, when I see
darkness engulfing everything around?
How should I forgive you?
There is nothing to forgive.
I led myself to this profane abyss
But you invited the evil serpent and now
I stand cursed for millenniums to come.
I’ll wait for my curse to be lifted
I’ll wait till my brow’s sweat satisfies your malicious hunger
I’ll wait for you to be Eve again
I long to be Adam again
I’ll wait for it to be Eden once again.

Lalnunfeli, 6th semester, placed joint Third Place with her poem here in the Writing Competition on "Hear Mother Earth's Cry."

Hear Mother Earth's Cry - Rosalynd Lallawmsangi

From time immemorial, even before the existence of life itself, existed the Earth. Perhaps it could be said that the Earth is life itself– the root of each tree and plant being the branches of her lungs; each river, lake and ocean her blood; and vast lands of every kind of terrain her expansive skin. Mother Earth is the source of life from which every other existence draws life from.

She has persevered through eons, and has provided every living creature an abode wherein we may live and prosper. She has provided humankind with food and shelter, with warmth and cool, even during the hours when we were no better than wild beasts. She has blessed us with the richness of her lands and waters; with the very air we breathe and the crops and plants that fill our stomachs; with everything she could possibly provide, and we have certainly prospered from her gifts bestowed upon us.

So why is it that we, humankind, harm her the most? Why have we taken more from her than we could possibly need? Mother Earth is being run to ruin by us– the very mouths she has fed. We have cut and burned her trees– her very lungs; and have poisoned her waters– her blood. We are killing her slowly, and we are the ones suffering from it.

She weeps and weeps and yet we persist, consumed by our own greed. Earthquakes, forest fires, landslides, cyclones, floods, droughts and more; when will we open our eyes and see that she is in pain?

How much more pain must we put her through until we finally listen and hear Mother Earth's cry?

The Department had its third successive Poetry & Prose Writing Competition on the 24th February 2023. The theme this year was on the Environment and specifically the topic, "Hear Mother Earth's Cry."  Of the 10 participants, Rosalynd from the 2nd semester bagged the joint third prize with this poetic prose piece.

She also took First Prize in the Poetry Writing Competition in English at the College Week 2022.