Monday, July 24, 2006

A Poem. A Picture.














Spring begets flowers.
Cold winter gives them coffins.
Tree always stands there.













Children bring their pain.
Father smiles in silent bliss.
The Mother is born.


















Birds fly in the sky
The temple stands on firm earth
Where lies our freedom?

4 comments:

Lg said...

yeah, nice pictures and nice poem too (well you know how my understanding of poems go!)

Anonymous said...

The seond one is great by itself. I didn't link it to the pic though (expanded and scanned closely) and found the poem standing strong and rather independent of the pic.

The third poem "attempts" to say something rather than just showing. Usually I would like this lesser than the second. But in this case I lost my yardstick and liked this best.

This is because I recently went to a temple near Trichy around closing time. It was a beautiful windy moonlit evening. And it was a fairly mid-sized temple. But on the whole I was rushed by the closing time and even during the darsanam I was thinking of how I am going to go home less than satisfied. Then when I was getting out, there were the kittens of the cat which lived inside the temple mewing. They seemed to be sporting a smug look.

It is in this context that I enjoyed your third poem very much.Though the 'conclusion' of your poem is very focused (and interesting) I was taken by the imagery and drew a parallel with my recent experience.

Great ones Agnibarathi.

Agnibarathi said...

@Pingu - Thanks a lot! I took them myself!! :-D
@Lavanya - Well, you understand poems pretty well, perhaps the problem is in reviewing and criticizing them! :-P
@Parvati - My mood exactly when I wrote them.

Agnibarathi said...

@MSP - A detailed comment deserves an equally detailed response! So here we go. :-)

The seond one is great by itself. I didn't link it to the pic though (expanded and scanned closely) and found the poem standing strong and rather independent of the pic.

Actually, it goes with the picture in a way. The picture is a shot of Talacauvery - nothing connected to the people in the picture. So, the Mother is the river - Nature actually, the children us, who bring our woes to Her and the Father is the Creator/God/Brahman.

The third poem "attempts" to say something rather than just showing. Usually I would like this lesser than the second. But in this case I lost my yardstick and liked this best.

This is because I recently went to a temple near Trichy around closing time. It was a beautiful windy moonlit evening. And it was a fairly mid-sized temple. But on the whole I was rushed by the closing time and even during the darsanam I was thinking of how I am going to go home less than satisfied. Then when I was getting out, there were the kittens of the cat which lived inside the temple mewing. They seemed to be sporting a smug look.

It is in this context that I enjoyed your third poem very much.Though the 'conclusion' of your poem is very focused (and interesting) I was taken by the imagery and drew a parallel with my recent experience.


What you say is true. The third picture goes beyond just being a 'verbal camera' (I too feel a verbal camera is better suited for Haiku at least.). And the incident you've related is very interesting. Perhaps you thought the kittens had a smug look. Perhaps they did really have a smug look. It would be a difficult task to let the cat (or kittens) out of the bag in this case! ;-)

Great ones Agnibarathi.

Thanks a lot! :-)