Poems by Shruti Sareen

A Peepul Tree Leaf

The Peepul Tree by the Ganga
outside my grandparents' house
became for me, the Kadamb tree
by the Yamuna, in the hindi poem
my mother always read out to us.
A peepul tree is home.
A peepul leaf is movement.
Wherever whenever I see
a leaf fluttering amidst stillness
I know it is a peepul leaf
the stillness of  home  found in its movement.

Carnivorous Cavern

Water swirled, milled around, whispered,
roared. Eroded. Penetrating the deep cracks
of earth. As deep as roots of trees.
Water that came from far away frozen icelands
where sheet upon sheet of ice melted,
under the glare of the hot burning sweltering sun
and gases which made the earth nauseous
and turned it sick into water. An abundance of water
now filled the oceans. The first floods were in the oceans. 
The oceans overspilled their boundaries,
encroached upon land. The oceans ate up the land.
The swirling waters were persistent. They loosened
up the earth, the soil swept it into the ocean.
And the water created a cavern. Below the tree.
A cavern of roots, always buried in the earth,
suddenly exposed to air. A cavern with roots as temple pillars, 
which humans had pillaged and pilloried. The water ate up the land.
Underground roots were now exposed to air.
The tree still clung on desperately to its roots,
to life. Resisting gravity. Resisting being swept out into the ocean,
 resisting death. Its frail tenacity is combating men.

About the Poet:

Shruti Sareen, born and brought up in Varanasi, studied at Rajghat Besant School, KFI. Graduating in English from Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi, she later earned a PhD from the same university, titled “Indian Feminisms in the 21^st Century: Women’s Poetry in English” based on which two monographs from Routledge are forthcoming. Her debut poetry collection, A Witch Like You, was published by Girls on Key Poetry (Australia) in 2021. Her fictional memoir The Yellow Wall is forthcoming. She is working on a series of love-letters, Sapphic Epistles(?), as well as a collection of speculative fiction, Berserk Banshees(?). She was an invited poet at global poetry festival, hosted by Russia, Poeisia-21.  She lives and teaches in New Delhi– whenever she manages to get a job! So far, she has mainly taught in Dyal Singh College, Delhi University, and at Jamia Millia Islamia.