Narayanan Nair writes

WHAT DO POETS DO?

Poets are humans first, aspire to be human conscience keepers,  

And suffer our deprival, but seek and exulted by beauty, truth.    

What do human do - the lot of us? crave, fret, toil,

Till the fleeting breath halts, and as dust turns to dust

Questions do spring in some weary moments, 'to be or not to be'

And 'to take up arms against a sea of troubles' (1)

Are poets the 'unacknowledged legislators of the world'? (2) 

Knowing too well that 'to think is to be full of sorrow and 

Leaden-eyed despairs'(3) and 'full many a flower is born to blush unseen

And waste its sweetness on the desert air' (4) - to shrivel and die?

Or 'rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth swung blind 

and blackening in the moonless air'(5)  or to seek glory and peace, 

Into the twilit deep stream of cognizance, wade into uncharted and unknown.

Probe, ask, discern, meditate on what life is all about?

Or to hop skip and jump into life's jumble, no holds barred,

With yesterday's ideas, today's struggles and tomorrow's hopes 

Until chemistry puts a brake, yes, it times every cell and tissue

Its feeds, sources and potions from the double helix seat.

Yes, chemistry dictates, the cosmic charioteer of time,

But lo! the poet may yet win the toss for a timeless being!  

  

References:

       (1) William Shakespeare - Hamlet.

       (2) P B Shelley - A Defence of Poetry.

       (3) John Keats - Ode to a Nightingale.

       (4) Thomas Gray - Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.

       (5) Lord Byron - Darkness.

 

 Pushkin -- Artyom Laletin