By: Goutam Roy

Old sunken world
beneath the Java Sea—
a vanished landscape
where giant creatures once roamed,
a realm of survival,
mystery, and time.
The shallow seabed
between the islands
seemed empty at first;
but beneath its silt,
the buried past awakened—
fossils of ancient creatures,
sleeping for a million years,
silent remnants
of a vanished age.
Then came the skull
of Homo erectus,
about one hundred forty-six thousand years old—
a mute witness
to Sundaland,
the vast drowned plain
that once stretched between islands,
when Java was held
within its ancient embrace.
Now, beneath the whispering tides,
the lost world remains—
not truly gone,
but hidden in the deep.
And sometimes,
when the sea grows still,
one may almost hear
the distant breath
of those early humans,
a forgotten murmur
rising through the water—
telling of a world
that sank beneath the waves,
yet never vanished
from the memory of time.