War Elephant

A poem set at an indeterminate past time in India, which I unfortunately mostly know only from colonialist sources: Kipling's tales, Around the World in Eighty Days, etc. So I guess I'm mostly recycling stereotypes, which may explain why it was hard to make it less pompous and more natural. There were some factual errors (e.g. "tamarisk" instead of "tamarind") but I've hopefully weeded them out. Inspired by a poem by T., and written June 23rd, 2008.

In the rhythm of an unseen war drum
the feet fall on the rich black soil
and their deep and full reverberations
echo amid the cavernous void where tree-trunks wind
and jagged vines sweep in between them
in the shadows of the glossy leaves
which rise in unfathomed masses to the sun,
stir heavily and vastly as the sea in summer storms.

Fauna haunt its shadows in untold numbers:
snakes twine thoughtfully along cool grey bark
or undulate furtively through the leaf-strewn mire;
monkeys wheel and blot out gaps of sky
scattered far above, like stray high windows
in an ancient and far-reaching fortress
letting through remote and starry glimpses of freedom,
clambering along their infinite woody perches
and holding their tails erect in graceful curl;
brilliant birds in a lightly sprawling congress,
glaucous and crimson and golden,
twirling in the airs or singing in the tamarind
or pecking with scimitar-beaks at a tiny feast.

Over the jungle burns the fierce white orb:
the force that desiccates the red soils
and steals the brightness in grass and leaf;
leaves nothing, only the bone-like beige of death,
out in the mercilessly open plains.

It is bound for this realm that the procession
tramples and pounds and jingles and slashes
a path through the strange peace of jungle.
A juggernaut has come and the forest is under its wheels:
men clad in bright tints of peacock and marigold and rose
turbans wound tightly, plumes nodding lightly,
embroidered and bedizened with rich motifs and jewels,
swords in their scabbards in glittering polish,
— in a pomp weirdly fit for a day of the dead.

Grimly they march, and the elephants' plodding
is the beat to the battle, the tolling of the bell,
at once a foreboding and an admission
of inevitability. Their leader, of choice;
the followers, by the force that precipitates water
over the fall and leads it to thunderous destruction
at its rocky foot, embowered in ferocious wilderness.

One mountainous charger after another,
swaying a great grey hide and the howdah above,
irritating trappings of the alien mask and armour,
drooping tusks, swinging heavily side to side
in an aimless, blundering brandishing,
and eye passive in the graven wrinkles
ruminating in a fatalist stupor,
ears flapping limply as the sails on a crippled mast;
the blunt round feet, so mighty and so helpless,
sink ungently in the dark-crushed leaves, the shattered twigs,
and the earth to which their invincible bulk
may yet be forced to bow and return.