Picture Poems

My Picture Poems

B.S.M.Murty

One poet has defined poetry as a ‘speaking picture’. Another says: ‘Painting is silent poetry, poetry is eloquent painting’. Words in a poem only foreground the meaning, delineating in invisible lines and colours, images and metaphors, the soul of the poem. Photography, a close cousin of painting, is also a creative tool of discovering art in the ordinary. Where poetry suggests and painting invents, photography discovers. They employ similar techniques, though with different materials – words, pigments and light, to create art which communicates significant meaning.

There is much that poetry and photography share with each other. Every good poem is much more than the sum of its words, just as every good photograph is much more than what meets the eye. (Ansel Adams’ photographs can be enjoyed as the finest kind of poetry.) And occasionally, poetry and photography can together construct an interface, a kind of musical ‘jugalbndi’, creating through their parallelism a symphonic effect.One recent poem is given here; some others are down below.

 The Leaf

The Leaf

Look at me

I am only a leaf

Torn from my branch

Where I was born and blossomed

Where I played and sang

Fluttered in the gentle breeze

Now lying torn and lonely here

All alone and musing

For many days now

Days I have lost count, in fact

Here I lie on sodden coaltar

Since the rowdy wind rose

Howled and rattled, jarred and jolted

And tore me off with a single slap

From the topmost branch

Of this old and timeworn tree

Bringing in its wake

Cool monsoon showers

Riding piggyback merrily

Yes, the wind was rude and rowdy

It shook the branches wildly

Swaying them sideways

Upwards and downwards

Wickedly in every which way it will

Tearing at them, at us the leaves

Till we flew helter-skelter in the wind

And fell here on the bluehued coaltar

And then came the burly rain

With huge buckets of water

With grating rasping laughter

And with angry crazy booms

In the dark sparring clouds above

While suddenly, very stealthily

The wind slunk away

Quietly to where it had come from

And then the rain drizzled freely

And whispered and sang cheerily

Throughout the afternoon

Then again fitfully in the small hours

Of the night gone by

And left me in the morning

Totally soaked and shivering

When the sun rose to dry me up

And make me warm and cosy

In my loneliness and brooding,

Till you came and paused

To look at me.