Poems by Siddhartha Menon 

Waking 
​
You are again awake
when you should not be. There is no way back.
You do not know how long it has been
since the last dream let go.
 
You wish you were held again.
 
What snares you now is the horn
of a train rumbling over and out of the bridge.
It should be nothing to you:
not a signal nor an alarm
 
but you are pulled along.
 
II
A foghorn
a solitary star
you hear one
and do not see the other
but every time you wake
they come back to you
inseparable
and you fear their loss
to each other
to you
 
III
At 3 a.m. you hear it.
 
You say this means winter is over
and the night is over
for you. But you re-enter your dreams.
So you may be wrong about winter too.
 
You wake again to hear it first thing.
 
Has it been going all this while?
It had dropped out of sound in autumn
and almost out of mind.
Now it is unwavering. You say
 
winter dreamlike has gone.
 
Hard to say for how long.
 
IV
 
things / that can’t move / learn to see
               Louise Gluck, “The Hawthorn Tree”
 
After a night’s rain you dream of sleep.
Something must end this stillness.
 
Clothes on the terrace can only drip.
The trees are too full to move.
 
You are empty but held. Thinking
never gave up on you through the night.
 
Your eyes are heavy but you are learning
to see. Among thorns the berries.
 
V
All night you saw more clearly
how things were going to be.
 
The hours quickly went by.
The jackals raised their voices
then the peacocks.
 
Your mind was a cutting edge.
Then daylight yawned.
 
 
Portrait 

There he goes in a blue t-shirt
with the white lid of a yellow water bottle
poking out of a brown cloth bag.
You would think he has it made:
all those colours on him
and time enough to stroll beneath the trees.
 
Maybe his thinking is full of colour
and embellishes what he sees.
He was used to going places.
Can he now keep up with his thoughts?
 
The years tug at you
not with locomotive smoothness
but as if you were a rubber band
a stretch here or a stretch there
and now and then a stinging rebound.
You are expected to hold things together
while being thinned to breaking point.
 
He hasn’t snapped. Stiffening he goes
with time on his hands and at his heels.
 
 

Siddhartha Menon is a poet and teacher. He has worked for more than 30 years in schools run by the Krishnamurti Foundation India and is currently based at The Valley School in Bengaluru. His poems have appeared in five collections and in journals including the Little Magazine, Nether, Almost Island and the Indian Quarterly. They are featured in the following anthologies: Both Sides of the Sky: Post-Independence Indian Poetry in English, These My Words: The Penguin Book of Indian Poetry and Future Library: Contemporary Indian Writing.
 
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