Poems by Geralyn Pinto
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Cormorant Fishing
by Geralyn Pinto
From Canary Spring 2024
Geralyn lives in Mangalore between the sub-tropical splendor of the Western Ghats of peninsular India and the great expanse of the Arabian Sea to the west.
Shapes shift in a stippled dawn.
Behind a muslin mist
silhouette of man, bird and raft
might just be wood adrift,
floating shoal of silica,
or black teeth of river rock.
Man and bird watch
for what the water may hold
and fire may free.
A lantern is lowered,
flame ignites blue-bleakness,
gashes it into gold.
Dazed by submarine glory
a fish rises, eye fixed
on come-and-go crimson.
It meets an open beak.
But this ‘Jonah’ will not rest
in the belly of the bird.
Day arrives on a curl of pink.
Spoils are shared:
big fish ceded to the man,
commander of the wealth
of land and river;
The bird makes do with small meal,
the wages of collaboration.
Note: Cormorant fishing is a traditional technique in which trained cormorants are employed to catch fish in rivers and inlets. This method is usually employed through spring and summer; the cormorant fishing season concluding in mid-autumn. The bird is fitted with a ring around its neck which forms a constriction and thereby serves as a throat snare. It is thus prevented from swallowing the fish which is then extracted from the bird’s beak. Once the day’s work is done, the catch is sorted out. The men keep the big fish for themselves and give the small ones to the bird as its earnings, so to speak. Cormorants are known, however, to resent being short-changed and refuse to co-operate if not rewarded adequately. This style of fishing was once widely practiced in Vietnam, China and Japan, but is now more of a tourist attraction. The last stanza points to the exploitation of the species by men.
© Geralyn Pinto
Flamingos
by Geralyn Pinto
Flamingos,
a parade of them,
perfectly angled
where foot and ankle meet.
Still and intent
as origami birds
in a child’s craft book.
Ballerinas ruminating,
first on one leg,
then the other.
In the giddy orange
of an Indian noon,
seducing shrimp
into exact and sinuous gullets.
Then, siphoning dye
from crustacean body
to bird barbules
till they burst
into wildest vermilion,
a riotous burning
from shaft to filament tip.
**
Flamingos
upended in riverbed grunge:
urban feed of waxed cups, film
and bright disposable bags.
Uneasy fowl,
tube-legged, sifting
polymer from polymer.
Perfect plastic,
industrial grey
and green flamingos.
Plump and polystyrene,
they will not fly
south in winter, north in spring.
© Geralyn Pinto
When the Old Place Went
A Tribute to “Woodland Gate”, Mangalore
by Geralyn Pinto
From Canary Summer 2024
in a shiver of flaking lime and brick, its last pillar stood as if to dare
the men in metal hats who clutched papers with
blueprints of death of houses, groves and garden
hedges.
To its companion herbage,the pillar was
another kind of tree where insects
puff-balled under cornices and
paper-skinned geckos refuged on
thirst-wracked afternoons.
Then the pillar fell to market forces. Its
plum-cake insides spilling out, it awaited
departure to a Green Hereafter; while the
trees gazed joyless at a ruined house and
garden.
When the season of ripeness came round,
only one tree stood, its leaves ignited by the
sparking heat of summer. But the men, slurry
steaming off their skin, toted up the sum of
their profits.
They didn’t see grass scribble between stones,
shrubs leaf out, wild and unsymmetrical, or young
twigs rasp on glass,
while old roots stealthed through loam, in
inching reclamation.
But the last tree saw this and died into a dream
where weeds strike through laterite, looping
tendrils live-wire open windows, and, outdoors,
ripe mangoes set fire to their trees in April.
****
Note: Our ancestral home ‘Woodland Gate’, like several old bungalows in Mangalore, is up for sale and will soon be demolished. Many have already met that fate; their owners having passed on and the younger generation moved to big cities, or countries abroad, in search of a more lucrative way of life. Land developers and real estate agents descend upon these venerable edifices, snap them up and reduce them to rubble. Concrete, steel and plate glass monstrosities stand tall on the graves of homes and gardens where love once ruled. This poem is a tribute to ‘Woodland Gate’ and all old Mangalorean houses.
With the ‘death’ of these bungalows not only has a whole gracious way of life retreated into the mists of Mangalorean history, but also a more nature-friendly existence has come to an end.
Interestingly, it was in the very material of which the houses were built that their eco-friendliness was most evident. The walls and pillars were made of red-brown mud mixed with unrefined palm sugar, called jaggery, and broken sea or egg shells. If a wall or pillar broke, and they rarely did, the insides looked exactly like rich plum cake. The pillars and walls of the rear of ‘Woodland Gate’ have borne the onslaught of over a hundred monsoons, and remained rock steady. It will take a demolition squad only a few days to accomplish what nature refused to do...
© Geralyn Pinto