By Salil Chaturvedi

Sure enough
four petals   a touch of orange in the stem
knee-high
That’s Farsetia.
This is the only place you will find it
On top of a hill, green in August       
A short-lived trick
Then, a return to bare and rocky.
I take inspiration from rock-loving plants
Clinging on somehow in the pediment of a dry wasted
hill.
Here’s the bullying shrub from Mexico —
Baavlia (the mad one) —
Crazy enough to seek this place
It hunkers down and digs itself in
double monolithic rocks.

My love!
It’s not easy being a desert shrub
Succulence, like a cactus,
is a good tactic
Moisture holding roots
work well too
But, by far, the best strategy
is to choose to live
for a short period.

There’s no need to survive a drought;
You’ve got to avoid it. Live life breezily
when the conditions are good
Skip out when it turns nasty
Rush through the life cycle
Flower and fruit in the window
of opportunity
Leave the rains to perpetuate the genes.
Beloved,
Deep in the sands
I await
the drizzle of your love.

Salil Chaturvedi’s short fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous journals, including Wasafiri, Guftugu and Indian Cultural Forum. He is the Asia-region winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Competition, 2008, and he won the Unisun/British Council Short Story Award in 2009. He also won the Wordweavers Poetry Contest in 2015. His debut poetry collection titled, In The Sanctuary Of A Poem, was released at the GALF, 2017. In 2019 he was conferred the Hindi Seva Samman by the Hindi Academy, New Delhi, for his collection of Hindi poems, Ya Ra La Va Sha Sa Ha. The poem featured above is from his latest collection, titled Love and Longing in the Anthropocene and is available for purchase here.

 Banner image by Dylan Sauerwein and is downloaded from unsplash.com