The eruption of an underwater volcano, that blanketed the islands of Tonga in ash and sent tsunami waves to its shores, also severely damaged the undersea cable that connected it to the rest of the world. How the islands and the people recover and rebuild remains to be seen, but it forced me to think about the failures of the communication systems we take for granted and how much more we still need to learn about our negotiations with nature.
*
footages and images on our feeds
but no feedback. as we scroll on
in our monologues of curiosity
a small part of the world has left us
on read, unable to reply, an expanding cloud
of ash swallowing its testimony.
when a place is severed from what
tethered it to the world we remember
it is an island but when nearly 12000 kms away
a fisherman swears to his wife he could taste ash
in the air tonight we might recognize
that the dimensions of an island can never be
you-by-me, that what we call an island
is something we haven't looked at deep enough
to see how it connects to the rest, that what holds
a fragile thing aloft is also a fragile thing.
but even sight would betray us
(by its sweeping hunger for boundless horizons)
if not for the sounds (spine-piercing grumbles
and whips of shivering shockwaves) that rein us
to our felt humanity, sounds bounded
nearby and together. the grey sky can only see
that we sing of it (and not hear what
we sing of it) that when the dust settles
when ash returns to its earth, we might hear the island
reply in its own words, resist on its own terms
and rebuild itself on a map of its own making.
~ ajay
21/1/2022
