‘Then you show your little light’: Poems from a new book of poetry for young readers

Tiger

by Keki N Daruwalla

The tiger isn’t burning bright
Either in shadow or in sun.
The tiger family is thinning
Two by two and one by one.

The tiger isn’t burning bright
In the forest of the night
Or in the wilderness of day.
We need to understand his plight.

The father Sheru’s missing now.
Sheru has been shot and skinned.
Poachers ground his bones to powder
For some Chinese medicine.

Bones would bring them power, they thought,
Put life into some sickly man.
Their souls were sick, killing tigers
Is something we won’t understand.

His skin is hanging on the wall;
His bones are packed in plastic white
And shipped out. A gecko on the wall
Is hunting insects on his side.

Once jungles trembled at his roar;
Tree tops flew – birds disappeared!
Monkeys screamed (what an uproar!)
Now geckoes nibble on his ear!

Lord God had stamped upon his skin
In equal stripes both night and dawn.
His black-and-gold won’t shimmer now.
Boar-hunter, Forest King – he’s gone.

The Listeners

by Walter de La Mare

Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest’s ferny floor:
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveller’s head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
“Is there anybody there?” he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;
No head from the leaf-fringed...

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