The Story of a Poem
Resplendent with words and images, a poem asked a reader what its meaning was. The reader, as usual, inquired about its writer first. The poem said that it was found lying in the dump of a house. It was an anonymous entity. The reader dived deep into the syntactic and semantic mysteries of the poem, and came out with a definitive meaning. He gave it a home in a book meant for found poems. It became popular, with the meaning given by the reader accepted by one and all. A few years later, a not very well-known writer claimed it to be his poem, and protested against its accepted meaning. He claimed that this was a distortion of what he actually meant when he was actually writing it. The reader stuck to his own version of its meaning, and said that his version was the accepted one. It was an unusual state of affairs: A dilemma. When controversy escalated to an illogical point, the poem itself intervened. It said poignantly, “ I may mean nothing and everything at the same time to each and everyone. The one who composed me was dead for me the moment he finished writing me. The one who interpreted me was neither wrong nor right: It was his own interpretation. As for the accepted interpretation, it would be the death of me as a poem. I am open to every interpretation: The writer and The reader. Let meanings unfold themselves. Don’t love me for my definitive existence, love me for my fleeting existence: A stream of meanings.”
