Tabish Nawaz
We often grapple with a desire of belongingness no matter where we go. The feeling can strike us as much in our home as in a foreign land, and one is alive with the longing as if an invitation was long due from somewhere, perhaps from within or outside or from an in-between periphery of our lives. From Jung’s collective unconscious and spiritual interconnectedness to Maslow’s need hierarchy, the notion of belongingness is comfortably ensconced within the core of human desires, yet it is among poets that the feeling of belongingness or the lack of it has received much eloquence. The poems of belongingness are poetry of landscapes, loss and displacement and how they work on us and turn into language by the spiritual stirrings within a poet’s soul as a witness. Reading from Lone Pine by Siddhartha Menon, one recurrently returns to the theme of home. The poems in the collection carve a path that leads us deep inside, searching within us a proverbial shelter. The presence of external, often teeming with natural elements, creates an opportunity for questioning our place in the space.
The collection opens with the poem, ‘Lone Pine’, where perceptibly out-of-place presence of pine in the plains, impels the poet to reflect on his own homelessness.
A mountain pine in the plains.
How did it come in this
unfrequented alley? How does it
survive so out of place?
It seemed that this was it:
belonging. Home was this.
But the pines kept murmuring
something else. You are
a guest wherever you are:
home is out of place.
Menon has appropriated the peripheral landscape to dwell on his inability to belong anywhere. The desire to self-exile resonates again in ‘Eucalyptus’, where being different the poet seems to equate with foreignness.
Look at this one: its pared-to-the-bone glow
that sets it apart from the dark
profusion of natives all around.
It is the first to be lit
its lean intensity to draw the sun
ray by ray to this native earth.
But what, in essence, is belongingness? This question crops up often as one progressively reads the collection. And Menon deftly takes his readers, while allowing them to dwell, on an exploration that turns the superficiality associated with much of our dominant socio-political discourses. As in ‘The Lesson’, falling of a tree by a dust-storm, Menon argues belongingness is much more than existence, it is in the traces we leave behind on the cartography of living, that persists even when one perishes or is removed from space.
Step over it where it has come to earth —
this is your transgressive power
as one of the living. But even in decline
it leaves a mark. It is here to stay
as a monumental lesson.
In ‘Moving On’,Menon meditates that belongingness lies in the act of returning.
If you do not belong here
you belong they say nowhere
This is where folk arrive
when they think their time is nearing.
But the poet emphasizes to pass this litmus test of belonging, one must first leave.
Come back to it one more time
on the eve of departure. You are
out of place no more
than the owlet that isn’t here.
Shake out your wings and leave.
This is where I feel that Menon delivers his message on belongingness, aptly alluding that if you belong to a place, you flourish and enrich the place with your presence. In other words, belongingness is about responsibility the space and the inhabitants share for one another’s well-being.
Meditating on belongingness in a space, Menon deftly veers his poetic vessel toward the objects thriving in that expanse, reflecting on the purpose each serve in a setting. As in ‘Ol’ Man River’, Menon suggests that a river is more about its purpose to flow rather than honorific status we assign to it.
The river is not an old man
Nor has it ever been the Mother
no matter the evening pieties on show.
In ‘Hanamichi’, there is a suggestion that each of our actions can be a meditation if carried out with a purpose, even if it can shift time’s burden a little, it would be enough to “unfeel” the time and make it an element of eternity.
His only company is the pigeons
to whom he is throwing crumbs.
They are not importunate.
They know what they can expect
as if they have played at every staging
of an act that ends like all the world
but signifies something.
Menon’s poems are also about death, not as a subject of grief and loss, but as an element or phase of living, where separation or frittering away is a facet of belonging to a space and inhabiting it. In reading ‘Confluence’, one feels a presence of decay, everything rushing to that zero, but only as an unending, repeatable process.
The night afterwards
the river is sheathed by the overfed moon
crumbling silently
with all that heavy sweetness.
In ‘A Cool Morning in Summer’, there is an element of separation. The poet acknowledges the temporality of existence, but there remains a tug to treasure his simple pleasures.
Clouds positioned ahead of time:
who would say it is peak summer?
Coolness out of time: will it prove costly
the summer flowers wither early
the birds that should be going stay?
An absence caught
so it does not spread. Erasure
will not leave a mark.
In ‘The Pond’, Menon gives a hat tip to Bashō, attempting to revive a dead setting.
One of the leaves has stretched
onto the tiles. No space
between captive leaves
for the outsized frog at the edge
come like crazy alive
to effect a haiku entry.
The attempt is a testament as to how awareness of poetry can animate our dead spaces. It is, in essence, a force of the living where Bashō’s art provides a life of its own in an otherwise a dull setting.
Menon’s poems shine light on the role of language and poetry in shaping our experiences. For Menon, poetry is essentially about description. His poems emphasize that our world is made up of words. We see them because we name them. If names do not exist, we may feel disoriented, and there comes poetry, as a rescue, as a response to the fall of our language. Sometimes, silence is too our language, which perhaps only those of keenest of senses can understand. In Lone Pine, one encounters much of his language’s silent beauty bubbling out of Menon’s experiences as a poet, floating above the poems. The surface of language beneath it is as resilient and strong as the tenderness contained within his verses, like a union of opposites necessary to balance our lives.
The book can be purchased here.
Tabish teaches Environmental Science and Engineering at IIT Bombay. He has published a poetry collection, The Ornaments for Silence (2023), and a short-story collection, Opening Clouds, Fermented Rain (2020). His short stories, poems and essays have been published in Indian Literature, Scroll, Outlook, The Wire, Tint Journal, nether Quarterly, Madras Courier, The Bombay Review, The Bangalore Review, The Critical Flame, Woolgathering Review, The Punch Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine, Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English 2021 and 2023 among other venues.
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