Why Read Poetry ?

05 Oct Why Read Poetry ?

A few years back, when language first came to you, it came through lullabies that your mother sang for you.

If you stay still enough, you will find that there is a soul of poetry which high decibel i-pods could not drown.

My mother sighs even today, when she fondly remembers that truthful cow, Punyakoti, from a Kannada poem.

While I dote on Charan Kanya. A Gujarati poem about a girl in a forest who wins overa lion through the power of her sheer gaze.

Read poems because they are a part of you, your world. It is the “stuff dreams are made of”.

Read poems, so that you can connect to those who are dead already, but speak through the invisible wall between this life and after.

Our gods arrive to us with lotus legs, in the chariots of heavily adorned poems.

Love happens when you grow so heady that you exhale borrowed verses like your own.

On reading Sonnet 18, when in love, does bard’s English bother you?

You mount on his lines and rocket away with your beloved, to the moon.

Adorned with alankaras or bare, packed with a rhyme scheme or without surround sound, poetry plays us.

It starts off with a flutter of butterfly’s wings; it goes out to rearrange the stars.

Every time it rains, or you see a flower in bloom.

Every time your heart is torn apart, or manhandled, or mauled – poetry provides you a balm.

Like strong tobacco you can puff it, or drink it deep as Devdas did his liquid.

It’s so tiny, yet all encompassing. It’s a crunchy nut of knowledge in the shell of words.

It does not provide you statistics, neither working principles nor truths, or anything you can quantify.

Who has ever become a millionaire by reading wayward verses?

But those who don’t read poem at all, may as well stop reading altogether, and accept the poverty of their lives. Because: all the words on the world wide web won’t sweeten those little minds of theirs. Or give them wisdom; that outdated word. Or provide a profound perspective on love, on life, and on this world, that countless PDFs of downloadable poetry so freely provides.

Poetry is a terrific container, air tight, non-spill, better than your Tupperware. Every time you open it, you sniff that personal homemade aroma, that bitter-sweet- tangy smell of reheated memories coming back fresh, despite all the preservatives in the deep freeze of the past.

So, every time you feel you are about to burst out but you are speechless, every time you open your mouth with a mindful, but no words peter out, try a spoonful of Poetry

METHOD

Keep it in your mouth for a while. Slowly suck every word, one after another. Then chew unhurriedly. Finally, swallow it.

Feel it slide smoothly down your throat, feel it mix instantly with your blood.

You may have some burning sensation somewhere in your midriff.

Experts consider that normal.

Its a litmus test, used for differentiating the alive from the dead.  But if this sensation persists, I insist, you consult a fellow reader or a lover. Share a poem or two with her. Pass it around to keep it alive.

Repeat the process.

Dosage: Once a day before going to bed. At least.
For Best Results: Read it aloud
Expiry: Eternity