Rm. Shanmugam Chettiar Poems

Who prays to God-
You or your soul?
If it is soul, why does it pray-
For liberation or amalgamation?
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Why must I like to entertain you?
Why must I long for your presence?
How’s that we speak nonsense with a sense?
Is it love? Mixed with sex? Be it.
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The trunk of the tree beams
That it has sent out beams
Which weigh heavy with plums
And sigh with plum visitors.
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Isn’t patience cowardice?
Isn’t tolerance insensitiveness?
Isn’t diplomacy mere cheating?
Isn’t patriotism being fanatic?
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I didn’t tell you I had loved you.
You didn’t tell me you had loved me.
We could love without any guilt.
It enabled us do without any qualms.
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A wretched society-
I don’t sing love;
Instead I chant Krishn.
I don’t play romance;
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A sentence is of words,
All borrowed from the dictionary.
Yet it has a soul
Unfound in the dictionary.
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Two brothers as two hands worked together
And made heaps from dust; they soon got married.
Since then they started working as two heads,
Heaps sliding to dust. Two hands together
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The one who seeks to preach
Does so with his hands behind.
For any help, he would be out of reach.
He generates words, not deeds.
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He is my friend, a relative too.
He has a daughter, lovely too.
He had a notion that I shall nod
To having her for my son to wed.
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