Saturday, October 24, 2009

The End of Silence

am no poet.
i know that.

my muse died young
a slow death though
with growing estrangement from my tongue
and my self.

a casualty of imperialism
and acculturation.

but of late I find myself
tinkering with free verse
in the alien tongue.

the genre issues a license
the poetic license
liberation from the strain
of logical exercise,

And offers a mould
that won’t crumble
when loaded with feeling.

minds crippled with entrenched silence
turn to the spirits of the muses
inevitably.

can they be raised from the dead?
will they take kindly
to the strange sounds of broken silence?

posted first in pareltank.blogspot.com on Thursday, July 10, 2008

4 comments:

P. Venugopal said...

Madam: This is something I have understood from within. Not intended as a debate, but something found the truth of the moment. The muse is in the air. Its notes float around. It is not the word. So it is not the poem that rhymes. Nor the free verse, because free verse too is the word. Its notes we can hear, every one of us. It is only the tuning in we need to do. Some of us fall into it naturally. Some of us who were in it naturally might tune ourselves out, knowingly or unknowingly, to other frequencies and might lose the muse. If we become aware, we can tune it back, but it might take careful attention to the tuning knob to get back because the noise around is too loud and the muse is at a very delicate frequency.
Listening to the muse is not for the sake of writing poetry, but to hear. Writing it can never be the same, can it?
(wow!!! Sorry madam. I never expected so much when I started off.)

P. Venugopal said...

By the way, I forgot to mention that. The poem I like very much--puts the problem exactly the same way I find it.

kochuthresiamma p .j said...

@ venugopal
the muse is in the air - true. but to capture it and craft it into a form - one needs skill - and done best in the language one thinks in.
in an alien tongue, lacuna bound to be there.
thanks for visiting the blog regularly

Anjuli said...

I must disagree with you- for you are a poet. A poet is not always one who rhymes - but a poet is one who sings from the heart- your words sing from your heart to mine.