Poem Review: ‘Touch’
I am part of certain poem groups in Facebook, where people do creative extempore on a writing prompt, which is a generally a single word theme.
One such theme was ‘touch’. Shwetahitesh came with this gem of a response to this prompt. I have endeavored to present and share my views on the poem that she wrote under the same title.
‘Touch ‘— By Shweta Hitesh Joshi
Here goes the poem:
The whirlpool has been over
And so all the conflicts and dilemmas
The song of cicadas was tearing through the silence of night
And there she was laying bruised and wounded
And the blood was oozing, now nothing would aid
Limping heart beats and hazy eyesight says her plight
And long after the Soul crumbles into dust
Late…too late, came the ego, to tell it was not lust
Weeping at the corner were love, intuition and truth
And it was the Touch after all…
Commentary:
The ending of the poem is where it all began.
‘ And it was the Touch after all’.
The touch was supposed to be an act of love. Her intuition, as they call the ‘woman sense’ did accept the ‘touch’ in trust. The trust that would be truthful, her love and intuition said. The truth that was backed by her emotions and instincts.
Love is a powerful emotion which overrides all others. Its so primal that it blinds the instinctive senses of womanhood that are natural defenses. To pierce through this defense, through gestures and words, is an act that crushes the soul.
This trust is a gift of love. Love starts and ends with trust. Love is a super emotion that way, that grips every heart. Heart is not anymore a muscle, but a place of all good things- trust, faith, hope and kindness — all combined into a word called ‘love’. Heart is the place of love. And that was won over. And the ‘touch’ is therefore a part of love, her heart said.
The act of bodily invasion, also called rape, has not been covered. But the aftereffect is. That is the beauty and genius of the poem. The start of it all — the trust, the instinct and the love combined, lead her to that time and place, where the act was to take place.
And the beginning of the poem is the end. At the end of the ‘act’ she lay alone in the night ’wounded and bruised, and with oozing blood’. Her heartbeat was just limping — a signing of the remains of life, after being subject to such distrustful, violent act of betrayal of ‘touch’.
Her eyesight was hazy because of tears — torn between the pain of the body and the ache of the heart. Even the songs of cicadas were tearing through the silence of the night, adding to the eerie and desolate ambiance.
Alone, betrayed soul and the broken body, accepts that the ‘whirlpool is now over, and so the conflicts and the dilemmas’. Love is a whirlpool indeed, with a deep vortex. Love is where heart plays the mind — inducing conflicts and dilemmas.
But with the ‘act’ such confusions do not exist anymore. The tumult is over. There is clarity that the trust, truth, instincts and love all have failed.
That clarity is also very expensive — not only the body and the heart are broken, even the Soul is crushed — the ‘Soul crumbles to dust’. That is the last straw on the proverbial camel’s back.
But even then, there is one more actor who tries to play the nice guy — ‘Ego’. The verse goes like this ‘came the ego, to tell it was not lust’ — this covers all the actors of the drama, post the violent act called ‘rape’.
The poet brings out the pain in two levels — physical and psychological. But more we delve, the poet’s genius comes forth. Her creativity, to end the poem with the ‘beginning’ and begin the poem ‘with the end’, brings in all the actors of the psychological drama -’Soul, Ego, Love, Intuition and Truth’. This, in turn, leaves a lingering effect on the mind of the reader.
For the perpetrator, its only one act of sensory gratification. For the victim of rape, the world comes down. The poet’s words, the poem’s structure, the flow, and the meaning, bring out this wreckage in the most complete form. No reader can escape the immersive writing of the poet — it ‘touches’ the very soul of every reader.
~Ashok Subramanian
Note: Poem verse and words — Copyrights Shweta Hitesh Joshi, 2020.
