Again Thinking

The human mind is driven by the need to know. Even when some knowledge is useless, the fact of possessing it is often considered positive, for one never knows when it can become useful. We are forever imagining roles for ourselves and/or producing scenarios where others - friends, relatives, politicians, priests, colleagues - interact to produce living drama. We identify with actors and actresses who role play for us in films and stage drama. For the poet, the business of imagining has to be tempered by form and at times, function. What is the poem for? What does it mean to say? Why is it significant the way something is said? Of course poets do not so matter of factly ask and answer questions of this sort when writing their poems. But the craft of poetry demands that they work on successive drafts and it is not possible to avoid answers to some of these questions. The role of the poet in the context of the poem is something a reader needs to understand and maybe even identify with. Catallus will forever continue speaking as long as Lesbia continues to live. Poems start in different ways: after a happening, feelings of joy or sadness, anger at an injustice, the warm glow of love. And sometimes from imagining roles. But no question is perhaps more interesting than What If? What if one could wave a magic wand and change things? What if there was no hunger and no pain? No injustice?A long time ago from within my mind I asked

              What If

            what if there were no flowers

            and no rain, no incense to burn.

           what if today means as much as

            the night's darkness,growing.

           and the sun, what if it wakes

          in a public sea, no waves.

          what if there was no single tree

          to hang from, what if the lone flute

         played and we couldn't hear

        and the darkness never dissolved

       from our closed eyes: no form

       lines stretched, curved over people.

      what if your eyes never light up

       and the clear sky becomes mulled,

      if the smoke in the house thins

      and we still do not see: no lips

      what if I said or didn't say,

      what if you said or didn't say,

      if the palm fronds lose symmetry

      and find pieces of sky born from trees

      without flowers or incense,

     without smoke, without eyes, glowing.

     what if I said: love is dead.

from Once the Horsemen and Other Poems

University Education Press, Singapore, 1972