Words For A Wilting Frond Poem by Ananta Madhavan

We scribblers deal in words,
Though they are but label-shards
To name palpable things,
And odd imaginings,
Feelings or ideas we conceive
In the game of make-believe
We have all agreed to play
As fellow-scribes today.

Sometimes a poem contrives
To call up entities from unfathomable lives,
Secret world-maps, portraits, diagrams,
The real and the unreal made true as dreams,
That we have dreamed ourselves and own,
No matter whence they came or shone.

But chosen words will matter if they touch
A remembered passion, inasmuch
We did not know of it as such
Without a scholar's gloss or explication.
Understand it in your fashion.

For me two Lakeside Odes
Have been precursor modes,
Foreknown from childhood to ripe age
In this cross-mirrored world, a stage.
Wordsworth and Coleridge had a choice of words
To recover "the glory and the dream" that birds
At dawn appear to know by instinct, the passion fountains within
Our remembered routine.

I don't need epithets and similes to write about
Wilting fronds
Drooping from the top of pine trees.
Dried up, ready to fall, but they have a dignity.
Bereft, but not banished by their dark green company,
They seem to be impervious to the end
Of life and age and season.

- - - - - September,2014