Beginning with the New Year 2019, World Sikh News happily introduces to our readers -WSN associate, thinker, writer, musician and Rabab-exploration pioneer and exponent –Chris Mooney-Singh. He will be regularly contributing from his vast repertoire of poetry and prose and critical literary writings and musical compositions.

Australian-born Dr Chris Mooney-Singh lives in Singapore where he teaches Creative Writing at Lasalle College of the Arts. He writes play, fiction and poetry and is artistic director of Lit Up Asia-Pacific Festival. His last collections were The Laughing Buddha Cab Company and The Bearded Chameleon.

Mooney-Singh has been a writer and presenter for ABC Radio Arts, Australia and completed his PhD on the longer poems and haiku translations of Harold Stewart, the Australian expatriate poet who lived and died in Kyoto in 1995.

Mooney-Singh’s verse novel was commended in the 2015 Victorian Premier Literary arts awards (unpublished Fiction Category).

To the Banyan

Today the law of five convenes beneath the panchayat tree,
you, the shade-giving seat of each Indian village council.
Ancient toehold of roots and hairy down-runners, you rattle fig leaves in the air
above a muscular girth of governance, long-upstanding to the people.
And no one would dare cut down the dramaturgy tree,
the air-con auditorium where yearly Ram Lila actors tell
eye-and-hand mudra tales below the moon on Divali nights.

You are the buffalo rubbing tree, the lie-down siesta of brahman cows,
the repose of elders on jute string beds where children ping their marbles;
you are the hotel of mendicant sadhus, and rat and vole keyholes for cobras,
the fertility tree at Holi throwing out rainbow shudders of chalk dust.
No one would disrespect the tree of conception, bobbing with plastic hope-dolls,
or plunder the prosperity tree adorned with ornate golden earrings.
Yes, you are your own temple by the mandir. Best of all, you are the shade tree
for village schoolyards. No one in their right mind would want to be reborn
as a low-totem worm through causing the death of a banyan.

You are the sunset prayer-time tree ringing with brass god bells.
Young women circumambulate chanting Ram! Ram! on fasting nights
and marry you, twining red thread about your girth to change their luck
when a manglik girl has serious blots on her astrological chart.
Yes, you are the festival of lights where the rangoli colours
form chalk circles on cow-dung, you the root-shelf for ghee-lamps.

Even Alexander embraced you: one vast banyan tree gave shelter
to seven thousand storm-bombed Greeks along the Narmada River,
blueprint of empire, the first cosmopolis, rhizome hinterland.
Without a doubt you are the Nation Tree, slow epoch builder,
the Wish-Fulfilling Tree, Kalpavriksha tap root to the Vedas.
Of all your followers, the Indian minah, that little black-hooded fellow
with a yellow beak has always been true and stays your best disciple.
Eater of pigmy figs he scatters your seed, kingdom after kingdom.

We, the battalions of Hanuman monkeys cling to your hairy chest
replaying epics in the subplot tangle of trunks and down-root runners
while you stay firm, eco-umbrella, sheltering us from angry gods —
even as coal mines choke the lungs of jungles that you rule over,
even as electric monsoons throw down their El Niño javelins,
even as the ozone continues to be shredded like a flimsy blue raincoat,
still you remain the solid idea, of permanence, a supreme being able to spread
new roots from a single trunk like a city of elephants across the acres.
Stretching through time and space like the web-work of milky star-fields
I only have one question for you, Banyan. How much time is left to us?