Ecopoetry Quotes

“The scent of sunlight peers through apexes of mountains
and a compost of water hyacinths. A name for each peak,
an unfolding in each summit. As you lay awake, dreaming
for a hundred years, history speaks back to you: the living
tissue in a tree stump, musky wildflowers, open mouths of
river-streams in full force, a dab of attar from chandan trees
on your wrist.”
― Sneha Subramanian Kanta

“Land is a ripe mango on your tongue
the ocean is a watermelon in your mouth.”
― Sneha Subramanian Kanta

“Sometimes rain, sometimes the darkness
leads you to light. Both opaque & tender.”
― Sneha Subramanian Kanta

“Animals rise through a slope toward the summit like migratory
birds over an amavasya sky. I watch a mountain loop our prayers
like an echo through the darkness. A glistening comet appears
across the sky, a streak of purple phosphorescence, as a row of
earthen lamps lit over a porch.”
― Sneha Subramanian Kanta

“The mountains harness light.”
― Sneha Subramanian Kanta

“Ghosts with periscope eyes,
each a mausoleum of violet lilac sent to earth in
another form.”
― Sneha Subramanian Kanta, Ghost Tracks

“Ghosts carry fragments of bone
into a portion where the earth is scatheless & place
them on the anther & filaments of roses.”
― Sneha Subramanian Kanta, Ghost Tracks

“In the dream,
the fields are green again,
the river is unnamed and runs like rivers
run, connecting with another artery of water, running into
the shore of another village.”
― Sneha Subramanian Kanta

“Yonder loosestrife, gusts carry into sea. Totemic wing. Ghost wafts above water,
unravels the seismic splay of muscle tissue in the flow. Waves lap into relentless
roars. Ghost in a landscape of rain carves bone beyond aviary. Water curls form
a heaviness in the body. North-coast. Clef wave with ghost made of fig leaves.
A storm groans with compost hands to return cyan-blue to the sea. The listless
downpour submerges ghost but ghost rises to the surface with gills. Water is a
memory trail of floodlines.”
― Sneha Subramanian Kanta, Ghost Tracks

“all memory turning to light
suns dwell inside the snow sleet.”
― Sneha Subramanian Kanta, Ghost Tracks

“Stars loosen the knots

of constellations. We build new homes with propolis.”
― Sneha Subramanian Kanta, Ghost Tracks

“The land eschews parameters & ghosts find firmament.”
― Sneha Subramanian Kanta, Ghost Tracks

“The sky is scythe into rain. Another name for the flesh.”
― Sneha Subramanian Kanta, Ghost Tracks

“There is a coastline beyond the mountain and a
mountain beyond every ocean. Sky coagulates like blood in
your body.”
― Sneha Subramanian Kanta

“Imagine: shoals of fish, a pod of whales,
a swarm of bodies around glacial heights

in kaolin snow. The velocity of clear-sky
precipitation increases with the glint of
shadows.”
― Sneha Subramanian Kanta, Ghost Tracks

“The granularity of bones in
a body. A forest with galaxies of moss.”
― Sneha Subramanian Kanta, Ghost Tracks

“When dew settles on grass, ghost tracks turn it to
gossamer rain.”
― Sneha Subramanian Kanta, Ghost Tracks

“Landscape is loving.”
― Sneha Subramanian Kanta

“The night is strong in its taxidermy on earth. The parts-dark, parts-bleached.”
― Sneha Subramanian Kanta

“Land, like your body

is clay.”
― Sneha Subramanian Kanta

“Nobody will say four a.m. is the
time to expect birds in winter, on the longest night of the year.”
― Sneha Subramanian Kanta

“But that’s not the whole story. The news is not and never has been, because it doesn’t talk about the small moments. Moments that matter to individuals, whatever they do or do not do in the grand scheme of things. And it is those individual moments that belong to people, that deserve to be faced and remembered as much as every big, world-changing disaster. And nature, because it exists in the details, is so easy to elide, even when trying to talk about it.”
― Sara Barkat, Earth Song: A Nature Poems Experience

“Greening in the epoch of biodiversity dwindle is a vestigial ritual.”
― Sneha Subramanian Kanta

“I want to tell the world
there is a bird in every part of your body.”
― Sneha Subramanian Kanta