A Poem Explodes
By Aditya Pandya published in ‘Mad in Asia Pacific’
A poem explodes —
or gathers beneath you,
a soundless heaving wave
that you never climbed
And you find at once
your feet are off, your toes
don’t touch the floor, and
the sand is a memory.
Gasping at the edge
your heart is hoisted loose
the suck of air short and sharp —
final, perhaps.
Now behind you
the swell comes apart, melting
into foam shapes and opaque colour
— if white is a colour —
It shushes at the silence,
you see white beads scattered
on the air, disappearing, and
you’re still standing
But you don’t know
where you’ve been dropped —
this shore is new and you are lost
to make your joyful way again.
This is a tribute to the many times that I have felt renewed, even ‘saved’, by poetry. It doesn’t cease to amaze me how a few squiggles on a page can make their way across time and space into some corner of your being, to shift the furniture by a few inches, or wipe the glass, so to speak, so that there is suddenly a bit more space, a bit more light. It is a tribute, then, to the care and craft that must go into those squiggles; to the mutability of our minds; to the connectedness of ‘self’ and ‘world’.
Aditya is a volunteer with AV Art Service
