poem
Why does poems exist? What is there different in poems from a novel or a story or a beautiful quote. I was stuck with this thought one day - what is so special about poems.
I found definitions online which took a shot at defining poems. And then I reached this below line.
Poems exists for a the purpose of making a language go beyond its usual transactional role which a language usually does in our daily lives. Poems raise words and lines to a level of aesthetics, and make you feel the world in a manner that is far more abstract and experiential.
I learned this poem called a ‘Visit’ by Balachandran Chullikadu. It is a poem about how the lovers sit in a room years after splitting apart. Or even maybe year after their unfulfilled feelings and love. They wander through the lanes of past. His mind races at times to find her memories as an answer to the existential crisis life throws at him. He long to meet her eye to eye again and to touch her once. All of these are my readings, to give a head up - I don’t even know if the poem was about lovers.
But I remember, in my 10th standard, writing essays decoding what the poet was trying to tell. The teacher taught us line by line what the poet was trying to tell. When the poet meant the birds of memory he was trying to tell, how swiftly we flow in search. And all the random things in the world. We were decoding.
But after years, after going through the fair share of love and pain, I read it again on a random day. And suddenly it was not a poem. It was an experience of a soul seeing a soul. A human from another side of the world, finally seeing what I am going through maybe. I experienced the touch. I felt it. It was like standing naked in front of the truth.
It was no more me decoding a poem. The poem was decoding me, I realised.
The poem was pulling out from me the feelings which I knew I could never put into words.
Because think about it - feelings can never really be told by language. I can never make you feel the pain I am going through as I experience it. That layer sits at a personal language. The feelings are processed in a language which is only yours - and you will fail to translate this to another human being in its fullness again and again.
And it is this helplessness of a human, that the poems capture and exists for.
Poems - the meaning is derived from within you. Not from the word you read, but from the aroma the poem carries. The abstractness poems can exists in make them beautiful. Poems are like being in a cafe and smelling that punchy aroma of the coffee hitting your senses.
You should let the poems take you away. They don’t know where you want to go or how you want to go. But they know what you want to feel.