Three Poems from "Ghazals for the Anthropocene"

# Three Poems from "Ghazals for the Anthropocene" ## I. The Last Tigers They say the last tigers will pace in our dreams, striped shadows through forests that exist only in our dreams. My grandmother planted jasmine for their musk, now the garden blooms chemical, sweet as our dreams. Count the species like prayer beads— passenger pigeon, golden toad—each extinction fixed in our dreams. The child asks: what sound did the dodo make? I have no answer. Only silence visits our dreams. When Priya writes of extinction she writes of herself: a vanishing, a persistence, stubbornly rooted in dreams. --- ## II. Mumbai, 2050 The sea swallowed Marine Drive meter by meter, Art Deco facades becoming coral palaces—meter by meter. We learned to read the tides like scriptures, to stack sandbags like prayers—meter by meter. My grandfather's house in Worli stands three stories high. Now waves reach the second floor—meter by meter. They say we should have known. They say we did know. The water doesn't care about knowing—meter by meter. Priya watches the city drown from the twentieth floor and writes poems that no one will read—meter by meter. --- ## III. Love Song for a Warming Planet Even now, the jacaranda blooms obscene purple, drunk on carbon, intoxicated by our purple. The bees still come, though fewer each spring, their fuzzy bodies dusted gold and purple. We make love during heat waves, ceiling fan spinning, our bodies slick with sweat and—yes—purple bruises from where we've held too tight. Even desire becomes desperate, tinged purple. What survives? The cockroach, the crow, the persistent vine. Love survives, Priya, though it may look different. Purple as a bruise, yes, but also purple as twilight, purple as the jacaranda, purple as hope wearing purple.