For many weeks now we have been enraged, excited, titillated or plain indifferent to the protests against ‘moral policing’. What started in Kerala as the ‘Kiss of Love’ has now spread to other parts of the country, with social media only too happy to be the vehicle of choice for opinions, trolls and information.
Poetry has its fair share of kissing and more. I am reminded of an embarrassed (and annoyed) lecturer trying to impart the beauty of Andrew Marvell’s To his Coy Mistress to a bunch of rowdy literature students. We also learnt Sir Thomas Wyatt’s They Flee from Me that has these lines, “When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall, /And she me caught in her arms long and small;/Therewithall sweetly did me kiss/And softly said, “Dear heart, how like you this?” You may also like Thomas Wyatt’s poem, Alas Madam for Stealing a Kiss .
In Kim Addonizio’s First Kiss , the poet compares the kiss to that of a suckling child, comparing ‘the sheer power of satiety.’ The child builds a seal with the mother and gives of herself, showing helplessness and vulnerability. The poem ends with these lines, “—that’s what I saw, that night when you/pulled your mouth from mine and/leaned back against a chain-link fence,/in front of a burned-out church: a man/who was going to be that vulnerable,/that easy and impossible to hurt.” A kiss as an act as powerful as a mother feeding a child.
In Stephen Dunn’s The Kiss , the poet starts with, “She pressed her lips to mind. /- a typo” The typo becomes the essence of the poem, the poet expressing his desire – “How many years I must have yearned/for someone’s lips against mind./Pheromones, newly born, were floating/between us./ There was hardly any air.” How wonderful, a literal meeting of minds. Stephen Dunn ends with these words, “I was out of my mind. She was in. We married as soon as we could.”
The 1917 poem, A kiss on the forehead , by Marina Tsvetaeva expresses more than its seven lines. “A kiss on the forehead—erases misery. I kiss your forehead. / A kiss on the eyes—lifts sleeplessness. I kiss your eyes. / A kiss on the lips—is a drink of water. I kiss your lips. /A kiss on the forehead — erases memory.” The missing last line asks so many questions.
In Tablets , Dunya Mikhail says, “Dates piled high beside the road:/your way of kissing me.” For Bruce Covey, “Kisses are circles.” Ilya Kaminsky, “kissed a woman whose freckles aroused our neighbors.” In Sugar Dada , J. Allyn Rosser is a sceptical onlooker, “Go home. It’s never what you think it is, / The kiss, the diamond, the slamdance pulse in the wrist./ Nothing is true, my dear, not even this/Rumor of passion you’ll doubtless insist/ On perceiving in my glance.” In Ghana Calls , W.E.B. Du Bois is “Burnt by the kiss of everlasting suns.” And Sarah Teasdale is haunted by the unacted-upon “the kiss in Colin’s eyes.”
The writing makes an appeal for a world of intimacy not overtness, for understated not overemphasised, for private acts being private and not public. These poems are sensual, heady, sometimes even risqué, but the way they are written – leaves a lot to the imagination. Sort of like the best kind of romance, wouldn't you say?
