Silence is a luxury in this metropolis
You must create your own inner stillness.
My poems are born from noise
Sans noise there would be no poems
Vibrations first heard in my mother’s womb
Her agonising screams fought to introduce me
to the city of riotous noise and colour
my umbilical cord entwined with noise
I never made friends with silence.
My father’s normally quiet voice
made a ‘joyful noise’ at my birth
(He loved the Psalms)
Welcomed me with a resounding poem.
A rattling taxi bore my small body home
into the waiting octopus arms of a joint family
A chorus of voices to sing the baby to sleep.
Lullabies to the sounds of city noise
An inheritance of noise, a legacy to celebrate,
Noise becoming the early salve for my poems.
Here the pigeons sit silently on my sunroom roof
I wish they would coo loudly
Like the Bombay ones!
It would be easier then
To write a poem about pigeons.
Madras Courier originally ran as a broadsheet with a poetry section. It was a time when readers felt comfortable sharing glimpses of their lives through verse. If you have a poem you’d like to submit, do email us at editor@madrascourier.com.
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