A snake's dead face looks much like its living one, and Balachandran V builds a short poem on that unsettling fact. Snakes have no eyelids that move, so their eyes stay open from "birth to postmortem." The poem begins with this piece of natural history, then turns it into a question about us. Why do humans hurry to shut the eyes of their dead? And what do we lose by doing it?
The opening lines sound almost like a shrug. "Snakes don't close their eyelids / 'Coz snakes can't close their eyelids." The explanation is circular, a tautology in casual speech, and the slangy "'Coz" makes it sound like someone talking to himself over a dead animal. The shift from "don't" to "can't" is small but important. It moves from habit to physical fact, from something chosen to something that cannot be helped. That sets up the contrast with humans, who can close eyelids and therefore choose to. The heading "Trivandrum, 28.05.2012" adds to the effect. It reads like a note jotted down at the moment of noticing, which suits a poem that begins in plain observation.
The language rises as the first stanza goes on. "Fused" arrives at the start of its line, blunt and clinical, and "postmortem" is a cold, medical word placed right after the simple "birth." Then the poem softens into speculation with its first "Perhaps." The body "rots away," a flat and unpleasant phrase, yet the eyeballs "would lie there forever, / Twinkling like forlorn stars." The simile is the poem's boldest move. Stars normally suggest distance, beauty and hope, and "forlorn" adds loneliness. A rotting animal is suddenly the ground under a small night sky. The poet doesn't tell us whether this is comforting or sad, and the poem works because it holds both feelings at once.
The second stanza turns from the snake to "we," and the mood changes with it. The line break leaves "we" hanging at the end of a line, so the reader waits a beat before the verb: "Scramble." The word is well chosen. It suggests panic and clumsiness, nothing like the calm dignity we associate with funeral gestures. The sibilance of "Scared," "Scramble" and "vacant" gives the line a hissing, nervous sound, a quiet echo of the snake itself. The poem suggests that closing the eyes is less a kindness to the dead than a way of calming the living, who cannot bear "the vacant look of death." The phrase "our dead's eyelids" is gentle and possessive, though. These are people we love, and the poem never mocks the impulse. It only asks us to look at it.
The ending is deliberately unfinished. A second "Perhaps" opens the final sentence, and it trails off into an ellipsis. If the eyes were left open, "they would light up stars / In somebody else's eyes..." The line can be read in more than one way. The dead's open eyes might spark wonder or grief in the watchers. The glint of tears might be the stars. Or the dead might live on as light inside those who keep looking at them. The poem leaves this open, and the ellipsis keeps the thought going after the words end. The "stars" that twinkled in the snake's eyes have moved into the eyes of the living.
The poem has no regular rhyme or metre. It is free verse in short, plain lines, with repetition (the doubled "eyelids," the doubled "Perhaps") doing the work that rhyme might do elsewhere. Its stanzas are uneven, seven lines and then four, which gives it a lopsided, thinking-aloud shape. The second stanza is shorter and more hurried, like the scramble it describes.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It begins with something a biology class might mention in passing and arrives at a challenge to a nearly universal custom. It doesn't tell us to stop closing the eyes of the dead. It only suggests that this tender, frightened habit may cost us something, a last bright, unflinching look, and it leaves us to decide whether we would want to meet it.