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Poem Of The Week: On Mute By Imtiaz Dharker

On mute

There is a video recording
of the incident.

Here is a woman on the station platform.
She is lying down. Her face is covered.

Her face is covered with a rag
or it could be clothing.

She is lying still.
There are people standing around her

some with phones. No one
is touching her.

There is a child holding
a corner of her clothing.

The child is crying.
The tears look real.

There is a child who could be crying
but there is no sound.

Imtiaz Dharker is an adept at suggestion. Here, in a poem of sparse but directed couplets, she opens a station platform tableau to the morbid gaze of speculation: is the narrator/observer an investigator sifting through the silent tangents of concealed motive, or a voyeur? Or is she the poet’s representative, a revealer of endless human possibilities?

Moving towards an unlikely resolution, the poet’s forensic turn is abetted by detachment, by the use of end-stopped lines and a steady methodical eye that traces the frames of the video film. Repetition – the indeterminate face-covering, the uncertainty as to the child’s tears – creates an overlap, not so much of doubt, as the foreshadowing of a darker disclosure.

In a poem of considered observation, Dharker’s final lines break seamlessly into something else – an intimation of pain, and of pathos as conspicuous as the silence in which the figures on the platform are locked.

‘On mute’ is taken from Shadow Reader, published by Bloodaxe Books (2024), and is reproduced with the kind permission of the publisher.

More information here.

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