SANTOSH BAKAYA
So, friends, last Sunday, I asked you to look around you and listen. Did you hear the ambient sounds around you? Did you listen to the honking, cackling, clucking of the geese? When you looked around, did you see the scurrying squirrels, the flamboyant butterflies, the kingfisher sitting majestically on the telephone wire, the white egrets cruising in the blue- grey sky, the parakeets hanging upside down from the tree?
Did something make you laugh or cry? Did the monkey kid clinging to his mother’s chest make you smile?
To quote Dylan Thomas, “poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, and makes your toenails twinkle…”
It has the power to transform mundanity into magicality. It has the power to create clarity out of chaos. It erupts out of you when you are happy, and even when you are sad or homesick. Poetry processes disorganised and chaotic thoughts into art which enchants, art which elevates, and art which endures.
I am reminded of Robert Frost, who says that poetry is ‘born as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.”
Don’t you see poets all around you writing about nostalgia, homesickness, and love?
Who can forget the love poems of Pablo Neruda?
Just a few lines from his poem:
“If I look at the crystal moon, at the red branch of the slow autumn at my window, if I touch near the fire the impalpable ash or the wrinkled body of the log, everything carries me to you…”
Let me quote Mary Oliver once again:
“I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also, in singing, when singing is not necessarily prescribed.”
“Ten times a day, something happens to me like this-
some strengthening throb of amazement-
some good, sweet, empathetic ping and swell.”
Everything around us is waiting to be noticed. So, observe nature, be amazed at its munificence, and you will realise that a poem is being born within you. Now pour thoughts on paper, or start jabbing on the keyboard. Hey presto! There is a rudimentary poem before you. Now retouch it, till it brings a smile to your lips. Then circulate it for friendly comments, but don’t forget, there is no such thing as perfection. You can never master the art of anything. Every day is a new day of learning and picking up new things along the way.
Hemingway believed that “we are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”
Poetry rejuvenates and intrigues.
Be intrigued.
Be rejuvenated. Be amazed.
The author is an academician, poet, essayist, novelist, and TEDx speaker, with more than twenty published books to her credit.
