Sampurna Chattarji and Rochelle Potkar

Potkar’s piece, Confluence, holds our hand along the banks of river Cauvery, across Uzbekistan’s Aral Sea to the Whanganui Mountains in New Zealand. Elaborating on the diverse geographic journey, she shares, “A poem, almost intuitively, witnesses the becoming of a pearl from a grain, and in the course, it strives for eco-equality. While writing Confluence, I thought that while world leaders and activists engage in climate summits, why can’t the rivers and lakes of the world come together to discuss the fact that their lives are at stake?! And if they do, they would share every little detail. Also, issues pertaining to water can’t really be contained within boundaries because a molecule of water belongs to the world as it evaporates for the river Cauvery, it might fall in rain somewhere in San Francisco. Water poetry too belongs everywhere with the concerns of a burning planet.”

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Another poem that hits us hard is poet and translator Sampurna Chattarji’s Highway. Ask her how she uses personal context to communicate the magnitude of loss and she says, “I think by turning the microscope onto one’s own gargantuan un-knowing is the way in which I try to do this. Loss is implicit in every life, every landscape. To work with that loss — and take it towards a place of healing is perhaps what poets try to do.” Giving us context, she adds that she wrote the poem after a car journey in Gujarat, aghast at the information her host gave her about the huge number of trees that had been felled to make room for that highway, but equally abashed by her own ignorance of the names of the crops that they were driving past.  

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