Five Poems: String, Pebbles, Laughter, Eyes and Each Time

String

Leaves,

moving in the rain.

Music,

plucked string of time.

Pebbles

Lovers walking together,

their hands

not burdening the other

with a touch.

Their walk

can never be measured

as fast or slow,

as their eyes

are never seeing

or unseeing.

They are waiting

for words to realize

that they are like pebbles

thrown in the sea

to raise it.

Laughter

Love laughs,

as my words

enter its palace

and

are shown out

immediately.

Eyes

Thoughts,

that will soon be free,

of me.

Come,

Let’s sit together till then,

and look into each other’s eyes.

Each Time

My every sense told me

that you would kill me,

a thousand times.

Who knew

that it would be so beautiful,

each time.

ABOUT THE POEMS The persistent theme of these poems by Hutashan Vajpeyi is the inability of language to access or describe many areas and resonances of human feeling. It is a striking theme—especially since it requires language itself to articulate it, and the poet has to lead language out to the place where it becomes aware of its own inadequacy, as it were. Words, in Vajpeyi’s world (“Pebbles”), are not waves of cascading feeling, but rather pebbles felt underfoot in the sea of human experience, or pretenders who “are shown out/immediately”. Fittingly, Vajpeyi’s lines are very short and his verse is very spare: it proceeds very cautiously, as if thinking or feeling its way from point to point. This restraint allows it to create a powerful groundswell of suggestion around the simplest phrases, which is one of the ways in which poetry is called upon to continually renew the human contract with language.