Blessing

This poem is about water: in a hot country, where the supply is inadequate, the poet sees water as a gift from a god. When a pipe bursts, the flood which follows is like a miracle, but the “blessing” is ambiguous - it is such accidents which at other times cause the supply to be so little.

The opening lines of the poem compare human skin to a seedpod, drying out till it cracks. Why? Because there is “never enough water”. Ms. Dharker asks the reader to imagine it dripping slowly into a cup. When the “municipal pipe” (the main pipe supplying a town) bursts, it is seen as unexpected good luck (a “sudden rush of fortune”), and everyone rushes to help themselves. But the end of the poem reminds us of the sun, which causes skin to crack “like a pod” - today's blessing is tomorrow's drought. The poet celebrates the joyous sense with which the people, especially the children, come to life when there is, for once, more than “enough water”.

The poem has a single central metaphor - the giving of water as a “blessing” from a “kindly god”. The religious metaphor is repeated, as the bursting of the pipe becomes a “rush of fortune”, and the people who come to claim the water are described as a “congregation” (people gathering for worship).

The water is a source of other metaphors - fortune is seen as a “rush” (like water rushing out of the burst pipe), and the sound of the flow is matched by that of the people who seek it - their tongues are a “roar”, like the gushing water. Most tellingly of all, water is likened to “silver” which “crashes to the ground”. In India (where Ms. Dharker lives), in Pakistan (from where she comes) and in other Asian countries, it is common for wealthy people to throw silver coins to the ground, for the poor to pick up. The water from the burst pipe is like this - a short-lived “blessing for a few”. But there is no regular supply of “silver”. And finally, the light from the sun is seen as “liquid” - yet the sun aggravates the problems of drought.

The poem is written in unrhymed lines, mostly brief, some of which run on, while others are end-stopped, creating an effect of natural speech. The poet writes lists for the people (“man woman/child”) and the vessels they bring (“. ..with pots/brass, copper, aluminium,/plastic buckets”). The poem appeals to the reader's senses, with references to the dripping noise of water (as if the hearer is waiting for there to be enough to drink) and the flashing sunlight.

We have a clear sense of the writer's world - in her culture water is valued, as life depends upon the supply: in the west, we take it for granted. This is a culture in which belief in “a kindly god” is seen as natural, but the poet does not express this in terms of any established religion (note the lower-case “g” on “god”). She suggests a vague and general religious belief, or superstition. The poem ends with a picture of children - “naked” and “screaming”. The sense of their beauty (“highlights polished to perfection”) is balanced by the idea of their fragility, as the “blessing sings/over their small bones”.

How does this poem present water as the source of life?
“There is never enough water” - do readers in the west take water too much for granted?
Why does Imtiaz Dharker call the poem Blessing?
Why might the poet end by mentioning the “small bones” of the children?

Imtiaz Dharker - Blessing

I was working on a project, filming for Unicef in Dharavi, a huge colony of migrants in Mumbai, India. These migrants come from villages all over India, hoping to make a better life in the city. The city is unable or unwilling to cope with their needs, but they make the most of whatever little they have. Working with the people who lived there, especially the children, I often felt I saw more goodness and human kindness in the slum than I had found in temples, mosques and churches.

One day in May, one of the hottest, driest months, the mains water pipe burst. It was a moment of pure joy for the people in the slum, because it gave them access to water that was normally rationed or controlled. The water was like an unexpected gift.

What I try to do in the poem is suggest first of all how dry it is, using hard sounds and short factual sentences like, ‘The skin cracks like a pod’. The people living in the slum can only ‘imagine the drip of (water)’ as if it were ‘the voice of a kindly god.’ The god here is deliberately written with a small ‘g’ because the kindly god could be from any religion. People in need don’t ask where kindness comes from.

‘The municipal pipe bursts’. I use the word ‘municipal’ to signal the bureaucracy that rations water to migrants. In contrast to this, when the pipe bursts, they are all united by the blessing of water, as if the slum has become a holy place. The imagined ‘small splash echo in a tin mug’ becomes a rush of fortune. The people rushing out of the huts become ‘a congregation’.

There is another layer of imagery, ‘silver crashes to the ground’ because the water arriving is like currency to them, and also because that is how water looks in the sunlight.

There are different income levels even in a slum, suggested by ‘pots, brass, copper, aluminium, plastic buckets, frantic hands’ but here they come together democratically, united by their urgency.

In Indian villages there is often a caste distinction where some people are not allowed to use the same well as others because they are supposedly ‘lower caste’. In the city these distinctions can be forgotten, especially in a joyful moment like this.

Most of all, the blessing is for the children. The water turns to ‘liquid sun’, the light catches the sharp angles of their bodies, ‘their highlights polished to perfection’. The sound changes through the poem from hard to liquid to suggest the rush of water. The lines become longer and more breathless, then slow down at the end, almost as if a piece of film has gone into slow-motion to let the children play and scream for joy in the water a little longer.

At the end I wanted to suggest the tenderness of the ‘kindly god’ towards the children, ‘the blessing sings’, but there is also the awareness of how fragile these human beings are, with ‘their small bones’. The poem describes a happy uplifting moment, but there are some indications that this ‘blessing’ is temporary.