Selected Poems of Iyyappa Madhavan

The following few are WIP translations from Tamil.

I recently (August 30, 2015) met Mr. Iyyappa Madhavan in Coimbatore through a mutual friend - my long time friend Karuna Prasad (theatre artist and publisher - Bodhivanam Publishing House), during their visit as part of a Book Release occasion.

During our talks, Mr. Madhavan requested me to attempt translate a few of his select modern poetry. He indicated which one. Later I picked three short ones as well to go with his longer choices. Hope you like them. These, as I have mentioned above, are first impressions and Work In Progress and shall be fine-tuned and reworked until both of us are happy, before they hopefully see the light of printing day!

In the canopy of darkness

Trees are indistinguishable

Only from the crash of the branches

Are their forms discernible

Silence is

When the wind shuts its eyes

Dew sleeps patiently

Like a beacon of light the moon

On bird-nests

The shade of leaves

In the sounds of feathers

Language was born

When leaves fell down

Dewdrops were scattered

As tear drops.

A woman is reaping flowers in a park

As they are scythed it seems the heart is

The small blades of grass

Appear like the hacked tails of lizards

Seem like the chopped tails are writhing

How would this meadow ever fan the breeze?

How would it ever cool with dew?

Is it not the total extermination

Of the sanctuary of insects?

Locked Room

Do not call me by name

I would prefer to remain

Without anyone, anything

From today I bear no name

I am just a human form

My functions occur

Out of my lifeform

Independently

My life’s functions end

My body is a locked room

Key you may possess

I keep changing my keyholes.

Sleeping on Air

No smoke in the kitchen

Vegetable lie cut

Rice boiling

They have no interest, nor protest

about spiraling prices

Their rice boils properly

along with soft little crystals of stone

A woman in sari

Another woman, in a small piece of cloth, fills water

in a small pot, from a tap

Some men are getting ready

To eat

A family with no feud, nor fight

No doors for the houses

No barriers anywhere

Food is being served

They pretend to eat

by making a show of chewing

and a show of their tummy-fill

through loud burpy noises

Out in the open they are

acting as though sleeping on air

talk delightedly as if

in love with one another

Never mind this world

replete with problems

Waking up as out of slumber

they leave for their homes

disassembling their families... casually.

Violating the Tree-torso

Caught in the carpenter’s hands, the tree rustling in air

Bird-house tendril-leaves

Shade flowers fruits palate

All mixed and carved out of trunk into form

Chop-block chop-block

The muscles of the tree’s torso spill out powdery

The smell that spread as the torso is chopped

The cacophonic cries of the immortal trunk

As human hands handle it

I am a wastrel

Useless and unable to stop

The violating vile world

Blessed to live with this pain

The tears of this base birth

Shall freeze like the tree’s death

Upon completion of work, the carpenter calls it a Chair

I, the dead torso of the tree.

Wooden Buddha (or) The Buddha Tree

I wish to be a tree

On the banks of the long-winding peaceful river

To become a tree is a good fantasy

To escape the noisy wails of this city

Imagining myself to be a tree

I dance with the wind waving my boughs

Birds sit on me as I sing to cure my loneliness

Caring, like the stillness of waters undisturbed by stones,

I am ecstatic upon realizing

I preach the meaning of silence

No brook has caressed me

A lot of trees around me

But among us never conversed have we

None of us steal away each other’s silence

Nor grief surmount us if one of us uproot

Neither tears if I am broken

As Buddha in a state of nothingness

So

Enlightenment can happen as a tree too

Please do not come near the riverbanks.

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