Poem Review: Strangers

When I close the doors of my home behind me, I meet strangers. But that could be any of us, don’t we? Meeting people whom we have never before is a daily affair. Some remain strangers, and some become friends and even family.

“Marius and Cosette were in the dark in regard to each other. They did not speak, they did not bow, they were not acquainted; they saw each other; and, like the stars in the sky separated by millions of leagues, they lived by gazing upon each other.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

Sometimes we just stare at strangers without saying a word. Sometimes, we mutter a polite wish, maybe a smile too, but we move on. Sometimes, a stranger waltzes their way into our hearts, and then…lo and behold, our universe changes.

The ways of strangers are strange. But what about poems about strangers? In this review, we present two poems, one of which is by a debutant poet in Ponder 2024, whose birthday happens to be today.

a) ‘Strangers in the Night’ by Anagha Fernandez explores the surreptitious pacts that the poet makes with a stranger, but only for fleeting moments.

b) ‘Why I am actually here’ by Shobana Kumar delves into the existential question, considering earth as a strange place.

Why wait for a stranger, when we have these poems? Let us start.

Poem 1: Strangers in the Night

Let us get out of this mayhem
Hold onto my hand for guidance
Moving away from all this noise
Come, meet me in the silence

Let us stand under the stars
Watch the shimmery night unfold
I want you to remember me
When you need someone to hold

Let us create coalesced images
Lasting imprints of fleeting moments
Leaving behind no real traces
Only our memories as testaments

Let us share, oh Stranger
Without holds or restrain,
Our deepest darkest secrets
And then never meet again.

-Anagha Fernandes

Commentary on Poem 1:

Tell me, stranger, can we sneak out? Just a bit. The poet incites a curiosity, almost scandalous, into a world that contains only them and their adventures.

Let us get out of this mayhem
Hold onto my hand for guidance
Moving away from all this noise
Come, meet me in the silence

The daily chores and the din of our busy lives — the rat race and the hamster wheels. We are tired yet cannot get off. Rinse and repeat — the earth cannot be more spherical than the egg-shaped lives we live. Between responsibilities and livelihoods, we lost the art of life. Now there is a chance — imagine seeing a stranger, who has caught our eye, secretive and alluring — almost inviting us away from the structured routine of our lives.

‘Let us get out of this mayhem’ says the poet, now having decided to fall for the mysterious allure. He is her ticket to freedom, albeit temporary. Freedom to the unknown and uncharted waters. It is prudent to assume that it is the stranger who extends the hand for her to hold, luring her away. He promises guidance to the adventure. Drop the din and follow me to sin, says one adventurer to another — but with a condition, their meeting is supposed to be silent. The idea is to not only get off the hamster wheel but to bring sense to the adventure.

Let us stand under the stars
Watch the shimmery night unfold
I want you to remember me
When you need someone to hold

Silence is our company, my stranger. We hold hands and just stand in silence. It is a time to just be. Just watch the beautiful night unfold before us. The diamond-sprinkled black carpet lay across the sky, wrapping the world in silent sparkle. This is what I want — you want — we want. This moment, remember me because I am the one holding hands with you as we soak in the serenity of the night. It is a momentary bond formed between us like fellow travelers.

Let us create coalesced images
Lasting imprints of fleeting moments
Leaving behind no real traces
Only our memories as testaments

Right from the planet that we live in, everything about life spins on its feet — the mundane, routine, and repetitive daily lives are now forgotten. Let us create new memories. The kaleidoscopic images that we form in our minds are like the spattering rainbows that form in the twilight, fleeting yet worth remembering, etching our minds with lasting imprints, yet leaving no traces. Only our memories can hold onto them as testaments. The poet sets forth a wonderful confluence of transcience (of images), and permanence ( of memory) yet maintains the secrecy (of their escapade). I read these lines more than three times to discover this layer.

Let us share, oh Stranger
Without holds or restrain,
Our deepest darkest secrets
And then never meet again.

The idea of companionship in an adventure is so well explored in this paragraph. A stranger comes without baggage, and there are no strings attached. The idea is to just free oneself and enjoy unhindered, without the strains and restraints of our ordinary lives. Yet, this is a secret. The transparency and abandonment that flourishes in the escapade are locked and forgotten, never to be searched for again.

We see the reality coming back slowly in the poet’s life, which is opposite to her request to him to hold onto it. This thin yet significant boundary between a wishful escapade and the biting reality sets the final tone of the poem.

“Nothing, nothing mattered and I knew why.”- Albert Camus, The Stranger

Nothing mattered. Just their presence together. Just the joy of the moment. Just the memories that they would carry within themselves. Just the fact that they would never, ever meet again.

If they meet again, they will not be strangers, won’t they?

And … there are times when you become a stranger, instead of seeking one.

Poem 2: ‘Why am I Actually Here’

An egg and a sperm gave us an identity.
Born in this strange land with a life energy.
Once a stranger to everything around,
To mother clingy and bound.
Slowly we befriend so many as friends and relations,
Living through them in innumerable emotions.
There are still countless strangers in this land,
To know everyone we need a magic wand.
The world may be now connected through the web,
But understanding humans still seems like a cobweb.
Finally, the solitude gives best solace.
Being strangers in our own space.
Rebirths perhaps takes us around the globe,
Changing our land and the outer robe.
The smile of a baby in the temple’s queue,
Felt like a stranger, whom I formerly knew.
Life is strange but beautiful,
I walk past maintaining my cool.
At times, feel I am a stranger queer,
Pondering why I am actually here.

© Shobhana Kumar

Commentary on Poem 2:

Strangeness is about unfamiliarity, and what if you were in an unfamiliar place and that place happens to be Planet Earth?

An egg and a sperm gave us an identity.
Born in this strange land with a life energy.
Once a stranger to everything around,
To mother clingy and bound.

Ah, we won a race, the first race of our lives. A race with more than thirty million fellow contestants. The winning prize is an identity through birth — we become humans. But as we come out of our mother’s womb, the only person who we know of, we enter this strange land — we get passed on from one adult to another; stranger after stranger yet I felt that I was the stranger. A little stranger. The person I could cling to was my mother and cry in protest.

Slowly we befriend so many as friends and relations,
Living through them in innumerable emotions.
There are still countless strangers in this land,
To know everyone we need a magic wand.

These strangers held us in their hands when we were babies. Then a few more come along the way as friends and relations. Their familiarity pushes us to react, respond, offend and get offended, love and be loved, entangling them and us in a cocktail of emotions.

“When our relatives are at home, we have to think of all their good points or it would be impossible to endure them. But when they are away, we console ourselves for their absence by dwelling on their vices.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Heartbreak House

The best part of strangers is that you can walk away. Relations hold a leash on us. But, beyond the immediate familial ties, there is a whole world of strangers we can never know through our timelines. The urge to know more people has pushed us to travel to distant lands and explore uncharted waters.

The world may be now connected through the web,
But understanding humans still seems like a cobweb.
Finally, the solitude gives best solace.
Being strangers in our own space.

The rush to meet new people is now a lot easier through the Internet. The Internet and social media have enabled easy reach; some make thousands of connections. But these are superficial connections, more like fair-weather friends and distant stoic relationships. Understanding this truth takes time, as one believes and trusts these ‘strangers’, till they get a raw deal — empty wallets and broken hearts. In other words, the honesty of a relationship while dealing with strangers is missing. This can be disenchanting for us, and make us feel entangled like a fly in a cobweb.

The desire to connect is replaced by fast dissipating confidence in human connections, and we start searching for solace in solitude. When we come back to this point, we become strangers in our minds. This points to the inevitability of self-care and love.

Rebirths perhaps takes us around the globe,
Changing our land and the outer robe.
The smile of a baby in the temple’s queue,
Felt like a stranger, whom I formerly knew.“

The truth is that we are strangers, as visitors to this planet. We rent a body to live, and it grows and dies, yet we return to another body to live another life. While the concept of rebirth is contested, the idea is that we don’t take our bodies while leaving, that is, when we die. The ‘outer robe’ is the body that we wear in this life, but when we are born, we end up in another place with another body. We, therefore, remain strangers through and through.

In such a transient, strange world, we still get familiar with a baby because of an inherent connection that we establish, the veil of strangeness dissolving in the baby's smile.

Life is strange but beautiful,
I walk past maintaining my cool.
At times, feel I am a stranger queer,
Pondering why I am actually here.

Life in itself is strange, yet beautiful with contradictions. As the poet treads the sands of time with caution while maintaining her equilibrium despite the paradox of ‘strangers’. But often, she questions her identity and the reason for her presence.

“A man stares at himself in the mirror and peels away all the layers. But the person he sees doesn’t feels like someone he knows. He feels like he is looking at a total stranger.”
― Ryan Gelpke, Peruvian Nights

Being a stranger in one’s place and on earth is a profound question. Is our identity the fundamental question of strangeness?

Poetry, Our Stranger:

Both poems provide contrasting views of our theme.

a) Strangers in a Strange Land

“But a stranger in a strange land, he is no one; men know him not — and to know not is to not care for.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

As how Poet Anagha illustrates, the idea is to escape with a stranger in a strange land, where the only objective is to live a life that one wants to, but only can dream of, and leave no traces, but only carry memories back to reality.

b) Strangers in our homes

“You do not belong to the castle, you are not from the town, you are a nobody” — Frank Kafka, The Castle

Strangers in our own homes, cities, and countries are a pain when we seek identity and relevance as Poet Shobana illustrates in her poignant verse.

We have just traveled to another strange land where we enjoy these inimitable verses. In reality, it is an escape from our real, mundane lives exploring strange lands, but without losing our identity.

“Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these.”
― T.S. Eliot

I hope we all become strangers to others through poetry, and identify ourselves as poetry lovers.

~Ashok Subramanian © 2024