Green green,
The man could dream.
Of verdant life and laughter.
Green gone,
So the song,
Man now lies in a gutter.
Emaciated, diseased,
Foul fumes,
A gas chamber to breathe in,
A hemlock to the lip,
The water'd be,
Stinking with putrefaction.
The seasons rhythm,
Akin the dirge,
Morbid, capricious.
On denuded land,
When the skies would pour,
Get wasted, inundated.
Germs would stalk,
dirking stings,
Pumping cancer, TB.
Contorted man,
Dwarfed and maimed,
Blind, deaf and balmy.
Ambrosial Ganga,
That turquoise Padma,
reeks with vitiation.
Outraged, defaced,
By effluents,
Her stainless transcendence.
Our life line we called,
An elixir cure all,
We grudge her a touch today.
Mercy oh heavens!
Oh people you too,
Pray, search a solution, a way.
"Immortalize your parents,
With a tree linking heavens,
Plant each today in their name.
It shall from tomorrow,
Sweep clean your sorrow,
With a breeze life sustain."
Like a suffering saviour,
The tree inhales venom.
Raining beneficent life.
Like the god's kindred,
A delegated creator,
To resurrect, reclaim, purify.
So to benevolent Ganga,
Her pristine purity,
A pledge we promise to give.
And to Earth The goddess',
We pay our obeisance,
Strew her like flowers, Trees'.
Save a Tree. Plant a Tree.'
Thus spake Tulsi aeons ago- Saint's akin a tree, feels Tulsi,
For others grows and gives.
Even they who abuse them,
Its fruits, even them, it gives.
Had Sant Tulsi Das been alive in these pollution filled times,
he would have probably spoken thus-
Saints akin a tree, feels Tusli,
For others dies and lives.
One who cuts them selfishly,
With life, even them, benedicts.
This poem appears in a leaflet of the Ganga Maha Samiti, Kanpur. Translated and retold from Hindi by Priya Om Jha.