Again Thinking

Thinking about my father-in-law led naturally to thinking of my own father. Especially as I am now reading another poet on his father - ondaatje's running in the family.

An intellectual, my father published his first short story at seventeen.

In the next forty years he migrated from his native India to Singapore, argued politics, exasperated friends and enemies, wrote literary criticism and subtly directed his childrens' inner lives.

Before returning after his first heart attack to his first love and publishing ten successful novels in Malayalam his native language, before death twenty five years ago at sixty seven.

Over these twenty five years it has finally dawned on me that I did not know who he was. I have my mind pictures - the sharp verbal jabs, the dates, incidents and decisions good and not so good.

Sign posts. Not much else.

Not that we did not speak - we discussed literature and most of all politics. We had the same attitude to money - necessary, but not sufficient in itself to require respect. We disagreed.

Now it is too late to ask him who he was. Perhaps it is always like this between fathers and sons.

The poem I wrote in 1970 after a heart attack it looked he might not survive (but did):

trees (for my father)

with age
have come the trees with leaves
branches in thin air
roots in thin soil, growing tall
impossible to put arms around.
sometimes a branch breaks,
a straying root climbs out
into the drying sun.
sometimes a leaf falls
to be swept away and burnt.
with age
the life impulse reaches for buds
hoping with flowers to resist
the drying sun, indifferent laterite
nurturing green pods into grown shoots.
watching
till wind and water
wreak their vengeance
turning innocence into bark
scarred and weather-beaten.
with age
how these old trees
become mirrors of ourselves.



an analysis of the writing of the poem is published in
Idea to Ideal - 12 singapore poets on the writing of their poems,
first fruits publications, singapore 2004.