The Forest Migrants. Poem by Subrata Ray

My vagabond in the spirit of Jim Corbet,
Often in leisure sets in forest.
This he does for the touch of wild habitation,
And for the remote pleasure of nomadic notion.

The broken images of the earlier trips,
The subconscious and the reverie ever keep.
The other dawn there occurred a marvelous dream,
My vagabond was wandering in forests with whim.

The first one was Jaldapara in West Bengal,
A home of the wild animals and their liberated calls.
But disappointed was the vagabond finding no beast,
Here and there the intellectual viruses hoisted feasts.

The 2nd image of the dream was the Amazon Forest,
Endless, deep, mystic, and perhaps the best.
Here too no animal did appear to please the taste,
Oh! What a horror! The same happens in the east and the west!

Haunted with the mystery of the animals’ evacuation,
My vagabond began to change setting and situation.
While it was wandering through copes, groves, herbs,
An ancient tortoise rose and showed its neck’s curve.

It harangued me, and started in a human voice,
‘Ah! The forests have turned calm, there is no nose,
The ferocious animals, as hyena, wolf, and tiger,
Were changing with intellectual fire.
They proposed to take birth in human vase,
Which by evolution is their own race.

They claimed to forest god, -for exile,
And were granted to take birth with human profile.
For they advocated, -in barbarity, war, and cunning,
From day to day the humans are more shining.

Again the humans are more rampant in casual sex,
And out do the animals in assault and rape.
So the animals have their prerogative of human births,
And having the perverse intellect, they would dominate the earth “

My vagabond’s psychic read the tortoise’s deliverance,
And in the transformation of the animals he finds no offence
The tortoise paused, and poked in a taunt,
Look, the whole forest is vacant, look in every front.
And I would request you, to go back to human-animal –land,
Don’t pollute the forest, giving a touch of your stand ‘

Why! how! revolted the vagabond, -a question of Dignity!
Yes, virus-headed –human-animal, -a complete frailty.
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