Koyamparambath Satchidanandan Poems

Stammer is no handicap.
It is a mode of speech.

Stammer is the silence that falls
between the word and its meaning,
...

One day a lean poem
reached Gandhi's ashram
to have a glimpse of the man.
Gandhi spinning away
...

I, Zinedine Zidane,
the stranger you feel like stabbing
as the French sun dazzles you (1) ,
one with a different face and a different build
...

One day a lean poem
reached Gandhi's ashram
to have a glimpse of the man.
Gandhi spinning away
his thread towards Ram
took no notice of the poem
waiting at his door,
ashamed at not being a bhajan.
The poem now cleared his throat
And Gandhi glanced at him sideways
through those glasses that had seen hell.
"Have you ever spun thread?" he asked,
"Ever pulled a scavenger's cart?
Ever stood in the smoke of
An early morning kitchen?
Have you ever starved?"

The poem said: "I was born in the woods,
in a hunter's mouth.
A fisherman brought me up
in a cottage.
Yet I knew no work, I only sing.
First I sang in the courts:
then I was plump and handsome
but am on the streets now,
half-starved."
...

Don't lock the door.
Go lightly like the leaf in the breeze
along the dawn's valley.
If you are too fair,
...

The mad have no caste
nor religion.They transcend
gender, live outside
ideologies.
...

Thorns are my language.
I announce my existence
with a bleeding touch.
...

I have never seen you;
may be I never will.
Still I know you are there,
like some unseen stars,
...

I see my thirty-year old daughter
again as a six-month old.
I bathe her,wash away
the dust and muck
...

In a flash I recall all the
misplaced objects of my life:
the ten lambent marbles
forgotten under the dry leaves
...