Impotent at birth
Impotent at death
and only somewhat potent in between
why were you born without your own consent
What was the karmic guilt of your first birth
and what about those maimed in the mind
crippled in the womb
eaten by meningitis
by herpes
by syphillis
by aids
what are their chances of mending their karma
And what about that baby born without a brain
How is it to be blamed
for not giving its organs to some transplant bank
Who cares if you live on
If you die
who cares
and for how long
Does one have to care
being but ephemeral
Copyright ©:
T. Wignesan, April 2, 1992 (from the collection: back to background material, 1993)
ABOUT THE POET ~
If I might be allowed to say so, I think my "first" love was poetry. Unfortunately for me, the British curricula at school did not put me in touch with the Metaphysical Poets, nor with the post-Georgian school. Almost all the school texts after World War II contained invariably Victorian narrative poems and some popular examples of Romantic poetry. I chanced upon a selection of T. S. Eliot's and Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and a little later on Pope's An Essay on Man and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. That did the trick. Yet, I regret not having taken to prose in earnest earlier than the publication of my first collection: Tracks of a Tramp (1961). There's nothing like trying your hand at all kinds of prose exercises to come to grips with poetry. Or rather to see how poetry makes for the essence of speech/Speech and makes you realise how it can communicate what prose cannot easily convey. I have managed to put together several collections of poems, but never actually sought to find homes for them in magazines, periodicals or anthologies. Apart from the one published book, some of my sporadic efforts may be sampled at http://www.stateless.freehosting.net/Collection of Poems.htm
