A poet has an extraordinary eye for the ordinary. In ‘Preface to Lyrical Ballads’, Wordsworth says, “The principal object, then, proposed in these poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect”.
Anita Thampi’s poem ‘Muttamadikkumbol’ translated by J Devika as ‘Sweeping the Front Yard’, offers a graphic vision of such a common sight.
‘The back aches
as the broom sweeps
into memory,
mud sprouts
on the front yard
of the house …’
The house is personified as one ‘in slumber/ eyes deep shut/ at dawn’. A contrast is offered, between the sweeper, who sweeps the courtyard in spite of an aching back and the other one who slumbers at dawn.
‘The rain must have
eased the ground
last night.
Earthworms must have
stirred under,
toiling sleepless, to
build tiny homes of earth.’
The house slumbers, while the earthworms built their homes. The difference between a house and a home is highlighted with the rain, earth and the earthworms’ sleepless toiling. But these homes are razed under the broom into memory, ‘after the sweeper girl’s morning dance’.
Slowly the house opens its eyes, and witnesses the yard:
‘No footprint,
No fallen leaves,
How clean is the front yard!’
The newspaper stumbles against the door, writes the poet, having ‘scoured the depths of the night’. The lines may allude to a pair of unsteady feet, which find way back home at dawn, after roaming around at night.
‘Then from clearing the shreds she rises
So thirsty, she’d drink the coffee to its very dregs.’
The writer is a poet, translator and assistant professor of English at BCM College (Autonomous), Kottayam
