Four lines in a row begin with the same word: "Enjoying." Balachandran V's "Joy" starts like someone counting blessings on his fingers, and for a moment it looks like a simple list of pleasures. But the poem is really about something else: not the pleasures themselves, but the ability to find them, and what that ability is worth if the pleasures disappear. The poem is headed with a place and date, Trivandrum, 23 February 2011, but it says nothing about what prompted it, so the words on the page are our best evidence.
The first stanza is built like a growing pile. It begins with a single item, "nature," then widens to "forests, birds and the breeze," then to "music, reading, traveling," and finally to four sense-words packed into one line: "looking, listening, feeling, touching." The list also moves inward, from the landscape outside to the body's own tools for perceiving it. Notice that this stanza has no main verb. The sentence just keeps piling up "Enjoying" until the dash and the short, hesitant "I realize -" bring it to a stop. That pause is the hinge of the poem, the moment the speaker steps back from the pleasure and starts to think about it.
What he realizes is stated in the second stanza through a neat repetition: "More than this joyful spread before me / More joyous is this gift." The word "spread" suggests a feast laid out on a table, but the real gift is the appetite, the capacity "to find joy, to discover beauty." Those two verbs matter. Joy here is not handed over but searched for. The stanza ends with "piddling and profound," a pairing that works on the ear and the mind at once. The shared p-sounds link the words, while "piddling" is a casual, almost comic word set beside the grand "profound." The poem's own plain language practises what it preaches by treating small things and large things as equally worth noticing.
Then the mood darkens, and so does the grammar. Earlier the speaker was enjoying; now he says "I will." The third stanza imagines being "Deprived, denied of everything," and the hard d-sounds make the loss feel heavy. The pairing "Of riches, of senses" is striking, because the senses he celebrated in stanza one are now the very things he imagines losing. The darkness could be literal or figurative. Judging by the imagery, the poem leaves both readings open. What it does insist on is that even then he "will remember / The light." Here the speaker turns to speak directly, with "oh life," as though thanking a person. It is also worth noticing that the first stanza of the pair ends with the world "before me," while this one ends with light shed "on me." The speaker begins by looking out at the world and ends by feeling himself received by it.
The poem has no rhyme and no steady metre, and its shape does the work instead. The stanzas shrink from five lines to four, four, then three, as though the light were slowly dimming. The final stanza also changes the imagery. Light becomes "glow," and glow becomes warmth: "Warming, keeping me alive." Memory is imagined as a small fire carried inside, something that gives heat when the outer world has gone dark. The verbs are quiet ones, "hope and wait," with no heroics, only patience. The poem's last word is "alive," and it lands with real weight.
What makes the poem worth reading is that its gratitude is tested rather than easy. Anyone can say they love birds and music when they are in front of them. The poem asks what remains when they are taken away, and answers that joy, once truly noticed, becomes a kind of savings: a store of memory that no loss can fully empty. It leaves us with a question worth carrying: is happiness in the things we enjoy, or in the way we learn to see them?