Listening To Yourself Poem by Ananta Madhavan

We seldom pause to listen to ourselves.
Listening is deeper than hearing with the ears.
Tamil has an idiom for passively letting sounds
Pass through one ear and exit from the other.

Great is the gift of birth, the Aural sense,
If we can keep it in old age, without a hearing aid
Artfully concealed behind the ear-lobe,
To render audible the sounds, even the noise,
Assailing all life in town or countryside.

To listen is to become involved in what is heard.
It is an active merging of mind and feeling
To interpret the message waves reaching us.
We sometimes need to listen to ourselves.