Sampurna Chattarji: Neither Reckless Nor Complacent
8.
The naming of Hannibal’s elephants.
*
They strode out of the Atlas,
flat-headed, fan-eared,
fighting with tusk and trunk,
smelling bad enough to drive the horses mad.
Historians, naturalists, archaeologists fussing
over a single Carthaginian coin.
Snow, and black
trumpeting rock.
*
Names invincible enough.
Names with war in their throats
and a dying hunger.
Spearheads entering flesh.
Mountains being scaled.
*
Only one survived.
Surus, the Syrian.
Indian elephant reaches Carthage from Syria via Egypt.
Names the colour of flint.
*
Their mouths turned blue.
In their brains the names still whirred,
thirty-seven bar one,
whispered by poets
in the form of birds that fell.
The gasp of the last big secret.