By Sambhu R.
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It takes much time to kill a tree,
Not a simple jab of the knife- On Killing a Tree, Gieve Patel
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It’s easy to kill a poem.
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If it’s the flying kind,
rip off its wings already slick
with the oil spill of words
and slit its throat
with the blade of your pen
run like a bow across the jugular.
The frantic flapping you hear
is the nerves straining for a final burst of music.
Plug your ears with indifference,
pluck the feathers, and clean up the blood.
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If the poem is Black in its epidermal garb,
you may choke it with your knee
pressed ruthlessly to the back of the neck*.
It takes some time for the oxygen
to be shut out of the door of the lungs.
Be patient. Wait for the last leap of breath,
roll the corpse onto a gurney,
and smile at the spectators sliding mobile phones
out of the scabbard of their pockets.
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If the poem talks too much,
incarcerate it behind thick bars of sense.
Try every trick from bastinado
to waterboarding and force a confession
of its all-the-perfumes-of-Arabia-will-not-sweeten guilt.
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And if the poem is too popular,
chances are that it is adulterous;
then it merits no ordinary death.
Stone it with words
stone it
stone it
stone it
till all its charms are ripped out of its flesh.
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To let a poem live, you need eyes
that can see the space between the lines
as the poem’s right to breathe,
and not as Nazi death trains
into which words are squeezed.
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Killing it is a lot easier, takes no particular skill.
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*Reference to George Floyd’s killing which took place in Minneapolis on 25 May 2020.
Sambhu R. is a bilingual poet from Kerala. He is Assistant Professor of English at N.S.S. College, Pandalam and is also a doctoral candidate. He has published an anthology of poems in Malayalam titled “Vavval Manushyanum Komaliyum.”
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