Reality Beyond Our Words Poem by Ananta Madhavan

Half a century ago, I was a Londoner
Commuting to my office in the City
By bus or electric subway trains
That streaked past suburbs, true to order,
Efficient and regular, reliable; all made real
By humans like me, doing their jobs
According to schemes we never questioned.

What is reality? It is a recurrent challenge
To human understanding. The only way
We can make sense of it is by proposing
Categories like objects and ideas, sorting them
Into classes, naming them, so that our idioms
Would correspond to diverse divisions.

As infants we surrender the innocence
Of entry into this world, this earth, our time,
And slowly grow to comprehend reality
Accepting names and words and meanings
That others before us have established
In lexicons and glossaries; the newer Internet
Connects a widening consensus
Of what is valid as Reality.

Do birds and beasts need names for food or milk
Or abstractions like Fate and Future?
Half a century ago on the bus or train
I used to see some passengers sit crouched
Over a grid of crossword puzzle in the daily,
Smug and bright if they could fold away the paper,
Solved all the blanks, ‘across' and intersecting ‘down'
Before they reached their accustomed stop.

A wily clue: What is ‘Adam's Ale? ' Five blank squares
Invite the solution. Those who write ‘Water' will smirk
Before alighting and trudge on complacently to work.
But Reality is tougher than a crossword puzzle,
Where we who have truck with words must move
Beyond the consensus of double-duty letters
Bearing the weight of ‘across' and ‘down',
And seek a richer transference with every clue.