NO MORE POETRY

Never anthologise poems.
Left to themselves in a book
The poem 'Cow' will eat the poem 'Grass'
The poem 'The Tiger' will pounce upon poem 'Cow'
'The Hunter' will kill 'The Tiger'

Never read poems.
Before you reach the other shore of language
Poem 'Land'
Will submerge in poem 'Sea'
Poem 'Fire' will burn to ashes:
'The House'
'Native Place'
'The City'

Never write poems.
The illiterate sounds
Strangled by the darkness of writing
Will resurrect

The rogue words
And the broken images
Cut out and buried
Will take up arms

The Mahabali* lines
Trampled to the nether world
Will come back

The question marks
Will interrogate the full stops
The exclamation marks
Will turn into scarecrows

Cursed by the unwritten poems
The book - a coffin of alphabets -
Will scream.

*A benevolent, socialist and mythical Asura king who ruled Kerala. Lord Vishnu, envious of his popularity allegedly trampled him to the nether world.

© Thachom Poyil Rajeevan

Commentary:

An accomplished poem is a piece of life. Whether the rules of nature and society undergo categorical changes in art and literature is an age-old dilemma for poets. Here this poem enquires into the co-relation between the world and nature outside and inside a poem. An unwritten poem is a marginalised, downtrodden social existence or experience, the poem says.