The Balcony at Coorg | Ananya Dutta Gupta

On first glance,
The warblers at Ibni
Seem the perfect role-models
For free birds.
They bide amid the bamboo grove,
They bicker among the hibiscus,
One can't tell their home from their retreat,
Their lodgings from their home.
Are birds just so?
So loving of generic trees,
So unthinking of merit and mettle?
It must be love!
A most discerning love,
Rejecting none, nor embracing one.
But the trees? Theirs
Is the humorists' love. 
Embracing all, em-bracing none. 

7 June 2022

Ananya, trained at Jadavpur and Oxford, has been teaching and researching English Literature for two decades. She was Charles Wallace India Trust Visiting Fellow at Cambridge in 2015. She has research articles, translations, essays and travelogues to her credit. In poetry, she responds to her immediate human milieu and non-human environs with a combination of curiosity, intuitiveness and criticality. The past four years have seen her publish poetry with Tell Me Your Story, Muse India, Gulmohar Quarterly, Indian Ruminations, Cafe Dissensus, RoughKhata and Teesta Review. Her poem ‘Howrah Junction’ – was one among twenty internationally selected entries in Global Conversations (CRASSH, Cambridge (2021). Her debut collection of eighty bird poems, For Tomorrow the Birds Might Still Sing (Santiniketan: Birutjatio, 2021), is in circulation now.