My Neighbourhood

The road to my backyard is long and straight Evergreen trees abound and provide welcome shade Home to myriad birds, butterflies and the bees Last summer their branches were sawn off, without notice The orgy with power-saws lasted barely a day The trees shorn of foliage, the limbless torsos remained To secure the safety of a VIP on a state visit To a smog-laden metropolis, labouring hard to breathe A few years back, we moved house to an oasis of green But now, the storm of development is relentlessly closing in Razing and levelling with electric saws and bull dozers And a host of equipment used by modern day builders Pile drivers mounted on rigs clump through the day Unrelenting even at night, when the elusive foxes bay Grieving in the darkness with plaintive howls For a vanishing habitat where his endangered kin prowls They have acquired fish farms and farmland And even encroached on the protected wetlands Which naturally dispose tons of city waste In danger of destruction due to greed and haste Truckloads of rubble are dumped every day The pace is frenetic, even in sweltering May Toiling hard for masters, who’ve deadlines to meet And citizens to house, from whom votes they’ll seek A haze of dust now covers construction sites The pace doesn’t slacken here, even at nights Construction materials arrive here daily by the truckloads And given shape by workmen, as planned on drawing boards What was once green cover and blue sky Will be concrete monoliths, stretching up very high With parking lots and asphalt streets And billboards and neon signs, ready to be leased No longer will fields of mustard flowers sway sinuously in spring Nor ripe ears of golden corn bob gently in the wind The sounds of frogs and crickets are a memory of the past Songbirds have fled, deprived of their natural habitat Slowly the memory of winter’s migratory birds will fade Never again, the razed canopy of green, provide cooling shade As I walk through my ravaged neighbourhood, I wonder why Impotent rage pervades through me and I silently cry