Urvashi Bahuguna

What I love about turning

over soil is the brief encounter with grubs,
shining as the light laps their blue backs.

The ladybug that capsizes as it clambers over
unsettled mud. In conversation, always a cobra

who rears his head, never a worm wriggling its lighter
end off the ground. Two women dig alongside me.

One carefully brushing mud off onions she shook loose
from months of sleep. The other calling her mother—

at least I pretend it’s her mother—to learn the right
way, her mother’s way, of caretaking. I spout friendly

conversation. Utterly unlike me, but the soil slicked
worms prove the vitality of this life and move me

towards communion. Once, I turned over the easiest layer
to find electric blue. It was a wire till the blind snake

began to move. It slipped through folds of soil so swiftly
I never found it again. In the same spot, I later buried

a munia—for a minute warm and pliable in my hand.
Remember when you lay inside me

and said, I could do this forever. Coddled, we seem able
to rest. Under the testing sun, I look at the fat grub

and think, fed, think, for now.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Urvashi Bahuguna is an Indian poet and an essayist. Her work has been recognised by a Tin House scholarship, a Charles Wallace India Trust Fellowship, a Sangam House fellowship, an Eclectica Spotlight Author Prize and a TOTO Award for Creative Writing. She is the author of Terrarium (The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, 2019) and No Straight Thing Was Ever Made (Penguin India, 2021). Her poems have appeared in Orion, Eclectica, Mud Season Review, UCity Review, SOFTBLOW, The Penguin Book of Indian Poets and elsewhere.