As music is to sound
So poetry is to letters,
Bread to flour,
Wine to the grape--
What am I to you, then,
And what are you to me?
What application of heat and light,
What friction causes us to dissolve--
Me into you, you into me,
Hearts into souls into soul...
Us into them,
Until the sentences of our lives
Contain neither subject nor object--
Only that grand verb
To be?
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1 comment:
In the same vain – one of my favourites (n it’s a very popular favourite):
"What could my mother be to yours? What kin is my father to yours anyway?
And how did you and I meet ever?
But in love our hearts have mingled
As red earth and pouring rain"
– Cempulappeyanirar
for me, its brilliance is in the image it evokes - the colours it fills the verses with. It’s a sangam era Tamil poem and the translation is AK Ramanujan’s. The poet’s name, in classic Sangam tradition, translates roughly into One of the Red Earth and Pouring Rain.
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