The Felling of the Banyan Tree My father told the tenants to leave Who lived on the houses surrounding our house on the hill One by one the structures were demolished Only our own house remained and the trees Trees are sacred my grandmother used to say Felling them is a crime but he massacred them all The sheoga, the oudumber, the neem were all cut down But the huge banyan tree stood like a problem Whose roots lay deeper than all our lives My father ordered it to be removed The banyan tree was three mes as tall as our house Its trunk had a circumference of fiſty feet Its scraggy aerial roots fell to the ground From thirty feet or more so first they cut the branches Sawing them off for seven days and the heap was huge Insects and birds began to leave the tree And then they came to its massive trunk Fiſty men with axes chopped and chopped The great tree revealed its rings of two hundred years We watched in terror and fascinaon this slaughter As a raw mythology revealed to us its age Soon aſterwards we leſt Baroda for Bombay Where there are no trees except the one Which grows and seethes in one’s dreams, its aerial roots Looking for the ground to strike. The Felling of The Banyan Tree as a poem is symbolical, mythical and eco-centric as it hides in many a shred of thought and thinking from different points of view, rampant urbanizaon, flat construcon, road making, renovaon of older housing complex, money making and supply of wooden logs to saw mills. From the natural points of view, the older sturdy trees with their mighty growth not only give cool shade but add to greenery and oxygen level. The Felling of The Banyan Tree is one of the famous poems wrien by Dilip Chitre who is but a Marathi writer of repute and a poet of English too as has wrien quite a few in English and has rendered into too apart from being a lile magazine man and a translator and an anthologist. A Marathi cric and poet, he is well up in English as English is his subject of study and has taught it too. To talk about him is to talk about his An anthology of Marathi Poems: 1945-65 (1967), Ambulance Ride (1972), Travelling in a Cage (1980); to talk about him is to talk about his Tukaram. To talk about him is to talk about Father Travelling Home and The Felling of A Banyan Tree. Such is the impact of his poetry. So social, so amicable and reflecve is he in his poetry.