Disembodied

1.

My body carved from abandoned bricks of a ruined temple,

                                                                from minaret-shards of an old mosque,

from slate-remnants of a medieval church apse,

                from soil tilled by my ancestors.

My bones don't fit together correctly                   as they should —

the searing ultra-violet light from Aurora Borealis

                                                patches and etch-corrects my orientation —

magnetic pulses prove potent.

My flesh sculpted from fruits of the tropics,

                                                                                blood from coconut water,

skin coloured by brown bark of Indian teak.

My lungs fuelled by Delhi's insidious toxic air

                                                echo asthmatic sounds, a new vinyl dub-remix.

Our universe — where radiation germinates from human follies,

                                where contamination persists from mistrust,

where pleasures of sex are merely a sport —

where everything is ambition,

everything is desire,                                               everything is nothing.

                                                Nothing and everything.

2.

White light everywhere,

but no one can recognize its hue,

no one knows that there is colour in it —          all possible colours.

Body worshipped, not for its blessing,

                                                but its contour —

                                                                artificial shape shaped by Nautilus.

Skin moistened by L'Oreal 

                and not by season's first rains —

skeleton's strength not shaped by earthquakes

                                                                or slow-moulded by fearless forest-fires.

Ice-caps are rapidly melting — too fast to arrest glacial slide.

In the near future — there will be no water left

or too much water that is undrinkable,

                                                                excess water that will drown us all.

Disembodied floats,                                             afloat like Noah's Ark —

no gps, no pole-star navigation,           no fossil fuel to burn away —

just maps with empty grids and names of places that might exist.

Already, there is too much traffic on the road —

unpeopled hollow metal-shells                                           without brakes,

swerve about         directionless —                     looking for an elusive compass.

Sudeep Sen has published more than a dozen collections of poetry, including Postmarked India: New and Selected Poems (1997), Lines of Desire (2000), Rain (2005), and Aria (2011). These poems are from Sen's Anthropocene: Climate Change, Contagion, Consolation published in June 2021.