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