Or to watch and at the same timeto capture.A restive robin in your pathflew onto a low cableand you had to choose betweenbinoculars and camera. You knewit would not stay for both.So near: a killingto capture it forever here.Only to watch is a kind of questioning.You are paralyzed.
Captivity
Siddhartha Menon
it is impossibleto kill and question at the same time.—Louise Glück, “Liberation”
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“Captivity” from The Compass Bird: by Siddhartha Menon.
Published by Poetrywala in January 2024.
Copyright © 2024 by Siddhartha Menon.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Siddhartha Menon is a poet and school teacher who lives in India and writes in English. His sixth collection of poems Lone Pine is due to be published by Hachette India later this year. The poem “Captivity” referred to in the essay appeared in his fifth collection The Compass Bird (Poetrywalah, 2023). Menon’s poems have been featured in the anthologies Future Library: Contemporary Indian Writing (Red Hen, 2022) and These My Words: The Penguin Book of Indian Poetry (2012).
"Observant and meditative, lit with gentle whimsy, Siddhartha Menon’s work on the animal world leads us from ornithology to ontology, detail to dazzling insight, in a wingbeat. Here is a book in which the reverie of snails, the ‘mynahness’ of mynahs, the unhurried gaze of nilgai, becomes a way to reflect on all the eternal questions—time, belonging, love, purpose, a world ‘stained with stillness’, in which ‘those who attend have the last word’. One of the most delightful new books of poetry I have read this year."
—Arundhati Subramaniam
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