Hi, I’m a poem, I like to write / right myself
But I’m not / knot a homophone.
Words, you no / know, sit on a shelf
And I sit on the throne / thrown.
As part of a school exercise, Daivik’s class was asked to put together similar sounding words into a sentence of some coherence. He had come up with these lines. I enjoyed the coinage of words and the overall ring they had. I told him that it was beautiful, he gave me a beaming smile, said his teacher thought so too, and went away.
These words however remained with me. There was something beautiful and abstract in there which I could not quite lay my fingers on. This set me up into a rather enjoyable stream of thoughts. A poem is writing itself, in the process of doing so it is also righting itself, obviously knotting homophones together do not make a poem, if you try that it will end up as a pile of words, which on their own have no place but the shelf, words, whether we know or not, knotted or not, do not make a poem. A poem, when it emerges from these words, takes on the lofty pedestals of the throne, and if it has not rightly righted itself, obviously it gets thrown…could this be what he means? From this pedestal, I was transported to the truly lofty thrones of Subramanya Bharati, and to one of the mightiest of his pedestals, Veenayadi nee enakku. Between the Veena, the instrument, the inert potential, and the fingers that play it, the kinetic, the manifestation, where, exactly, does the music reside? How, really, does a poem, emerge from words, knotted, or not?
I was thusly immersed when Daivik came back, asking what I was thinking so deeply. “About the beauty of your lines Daivik”, I said. “What about them?”, he asked. “I’m trying to find out what makes them beautiful”. His curiosity was aroused and with a little gleam in the eyes, he asked, “Did you find out?”. “No, Daivik”, I confessed, “I’m not able to”. With a near perfect non-chalance he said, “May be that is what makes it beautiful”, and ran away.
