Poet of Honour is a series of Ars Notoria and Word Masala Foundation’s celebration of some of the best contemporary poets who have become iconic and a major inspiration. This month we are thrilled to present Pascale Petit, who just won this year’s £5,000 inaugural Laurel Prize for ecopoetry with Mama Amazonica (Bloodaxe Books). Not forgetting that her this year’s collection Tiger Girl, depicting her grandmother, was also short listed for the Forward Prize. In the collection, Petit embraces her grandmother’s Indian heritage in the settings of the nature’s voice through subcontinent’s fauna and flora. As in her other collections, her voice is a santoor gently drifting and scattering droplets of music invoking soul’s delight.
-Yogesh Patel MBE
Three poems by Pascale Petit
credit Brian Fraser
For a Coming Extinction
(after W. S. Merwin)
You whom we have named Charger, Challenger,
Great King, and Noor the shining one,
now that you are at the brink of extinction,
I am writing to those of you
who have reached the black groves of the sky,
where you glide beneath branches of galaxies,
your fur damasked with constellations,
tell him who sits at the centre of the mystery,
that we did all we could.
That we kept some of you alive
in the prisons we built for you.
You tigers of Amur and Sumatra,
of Turkey and Iran, Java and Borneo,
and you – Royal Bengals, who lingered last.
Tell the one who would judge
that we are innocent of your slaughter.
That we kiss each pugmark,
the water trembling inside
as if you had just passed.
Masters of ambush and camouflage,
hiding behind astral trees,
invisible as always,
when we gaze up at the night,
when we look lightyears into the past –
we see your eyes staring down at us.
The Anthropocene
A bride wears a train
of three thousand
peacock plumes
She walks down the aisle
like a planet
trailing her seas
every wave an eye
shivering with the memory
of the display
how the trees turned
to watch as the bird
raised the fan of his tail –
emerald forests
bronze atolls
lapis islands
every eye
a storm
held in abeyance
Green Bee-eater
More precious than all
the gems of Jaipur –
the green bee-eater.
If you see one singing
tree-tree-tree
with his space-black bill
and rufous cap,
his robes
all shades of emerald
like treetops glimpsed
from a plane,
his blue cheeks,
black eye-mask
and the delicate tail streamer
like a plume of smoke –
you might dream
of the forests
that once clothed
our flying planet.
And perhaps his singing
is a spell
to call our forests back –
tree
by tree
by tree.
All poems are with permission from Bloodaxe Books
To read poets honoured previously here is roll call; please click on the name.
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