Siddhartha Menon

Siddhartha Menon has been writing poetry for more than ten years. His poems have appeared in The Poetry Chain (based in Thiruvananthapuram) and in The Little Magazine. He teaches at the Rishi Valley School near Madanapalle in Andhra Pradesh.

Writing again

When you return to it after an absence
the first attempts are water
from a tap not used for months.

You twist it, and it turns stiffly.
You are not certain
of the connection, nor what the tank contains.

At first nothing emerges –
not even the gurgling sounds you would expect.
With so much grime from journeys

you are unnerved by the empty hiss.
But then a trickle
which quickly swells and the blessed

thrash of water on stone.
You are thankful the thing still seems to work.
But it is muddy – more residue

than water can hold invisibly,
and what emerges is brown,
twisting about itself like rope.

You must let it run, however,
for if you stay and watch,
carefully, the colour is being run through.

Soon, at least to unaided eyes,
the sediment has gone.
The stream will straighten, or stop.

At a poetry reading

I turn this poet’s pages.
I drift, my anchor snags
and I rock gently above

page fifty-one, where the poet
reads her wares to a drowsy
or indulgent audience –

relatives, the idle
curious, some driven in
by the rain – altogether

not more than a dozen or so.
And I am one of them,
a little damp, straining

to hear her voice in the snores
of the pensioner beside me.
Applause would be disruptive.

I do not know what lifts
and dips me in her wake,
but I find I am drifting into

a kinship with she who reads
apparently to herself,
the phrases brushed aside

and furrowing placid water.

No queue

I’d like to jump the queue. May I?
There is just the single, small counter.
The door beside it swings too quickly:
you can’t see through. No one’s sure
how he got here, or when - or now
that he is here, what he’ll do, or why.

Where, in fact, is the queue?
Our movement is not so clearly linear.
A joke is doing the rounds:
that we exhibit Brownian slow-motion
to watchers behind one-way glass.

And yet the counter imposes a broad
direction. We give it covert glances,
theorize, with nothing better to do.
We can’t quite see the figure behind it.
Someone, randomly it seems,
is drawn to it, hands in pockets, whistling,
and pauses, fishes out some change,
then disappears. But some bypass it.
They push to that side before their time
and do not give you a wave, a glance.
Are they adequately equipped?
Perhaps they’ve had notice in advance
for no one checks them. No one protests.

Is there a consensus on who is next?
Speculation is rife. Link arms, they say,
though entry is strictly one at a time.
Each must have a turn, so be
courteous, allow others ahead.

Expertise

The expert, being interviewed
on last night’s news,
said in measured tones
that from a certain standpoint –
if you took the longer view –
15 dead was actually
(she straightened in her high-backed chair,
white light gleaming on her forehead)
quite sustainable.
Such figures would taper off,
she said, as the interim administration
established its authority,
though there would surely be –
not unnaturally –
recalcitrant groups.
But even they would be co-opted
or crushed. Consider the unmistakable signs
(she laid them out, one by one)
that this would happen, and fairly soon.
There could be little doubt.
It would be premature to surmise
the failure of this enterprise.
Meanwhile, she might have added,
the dead would be distinguished
as casualties of war,
dressed and laid out side by side
under flags, and no longer likely
to be held responsible for any
collateral damage.

Nutrition

Each of us knows that the other knows.

He lies, wasting, a pillow
between the knees to flesh them apart.
He wonders aloud at the way his skin is drying,
and you have a reason pat: nutrition.
There are words you hope will not arise.

You allow, with him, that it is only
a matter of time before he turns the corner
and begins on the long road back.
He must keep up his strength: nutrition.
What for? But this is not a question to be asked.

You know each time
that his voice has traveled a longer way
than the previous time,
and you speak louder than you are wont
as if your words could chain him back.
Forge anything. War
will do, or education
or what the dogs are upto now.

You sip, thoughtfully.
A chain is as strong as its weakest link. Your smile
bespatters the clean black tiles

and yet you see, each time,
that his eyes above the grey cheekbones
are luminous and young.
He is particular
that you must have a tray to place your cup.