The 1000+ beautiful banyans on the Hyderabad-Bijapur road are our living, breathing, green, glorious natural heritage! Say no to cutting, felling, axeing, chopping, dismembering, translocating, damaging, destroying, removing, reducing, truncating, and otherwise tormenting the beautiful old trees that line the road to Chevella (and Vikarabad).
Help save them. Protect our natural heritage. Keep Hyderabad's remaining green cover intact (its bad enough already with all the trees being felled) to keep temperatures from skyrocketing even further. Its 45C today! Isn't that HOT enough for all of us already? #SavebanyansofChevella#HyderabadHeritage
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To keep the banyan love alive, we are launching a new series of poem-posts. One banyan tree poem a day. #BanyanTreePoems
We begin with that old chestnut (tree metaphors ahoy!) by Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore's popular The Banyan Tree was first translated into English for the 1913 volume of children's verse, The Crescent Moon
The Banyan Tree
O you shaggy-headed banyan tree standing on the bank of the pond,
have you forgotten the little child, like the birds that have nested
in your branches and left you?
Do you not remember how he sat at the window and wondered
at the tangle of your roots and plunged underground?
The women would come to fill their jars in the pond,
and your huge black shadow would wriggle on the water
like sleep struggling to wake up.
Sunlight danced on the ripples like restless tiny shuttles
weaving golden tapestry.
Two ducks swam by the weedy margin above their shadows,
and the child would sit still and think.
He longed to be the wind and blow through your resting branches,
to be your shadow and lengthen with the day on the water,
to be a bird and perch on your topmost twig, and to float like
those ducks among the weeds and shadows.
- Rabindranath Tagore. From The Crescent Moon, 1913.
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