A young dragonfly sways on a vine and plans its whole future, while a bird a few feet above sharpens its beak. Balachandran V's "Coming of Age" is only ten lines long, but it holds a small drama: one creature's dream of a limitless life, and another's quiet readiness to end it. The poem never states the outcome. It stops just before.
The first stanza is built from the dragonfly's own confidence. The opening image, "The vine danced in the wind," is light and cheerful, and "swinging gently" keeps that mood going. Then comes a run of declarations, each beginning "I will": become an adult, "take in many lovers," have "offsprings in thousands." The ambitions grow in size, from the self to romance to a whole generation. The last claim is the largest: "This beautiful land and brook mine." The verb is missing, which helps. With no "is," the line sounds less like a statement of fact than a grab, the way a child might announce that everything in view belongs to them. The thought also has hardly any punctuation, so it tumbles out in one breathless rush. Only the semicolon after "adult" slows it, and that is the most cautious moment in the dragonfly's speech.
The poem also withholds who is speaking. "The young one" could, on a first reading, be the vine itself, and we only learn it is a dragonfly in the final line. That delay means we enter the dragonfly's mind before we see it from outside. We share its excitement before we are shown how small and exposed it is.
The second stanza changes the angle, and the shift is physical. "Above" puts the Bee-eater higher than the dragonfly, and the "low-hanging branch" brings him uncomfortably close. Where the dragonfly's world is movement (dancing, swinging), the bird is still and busy with a single task, "sharpening his beak." It is an ordinary, practical action, and that ordinariness is what makes it chilling. Bee-eaters hunt flying insects, and that is common knowledge, so the reader soon understands what the sharpening is for. The poem never has to say it.
The most unsettling phrase comes next: "His eyes had a kindness one could not fathom." Kindness is the last word we expect for a predator, and the poem refuses to explain it. Perhaps it is pity for a creature that does not know its danger. Perhaps it is the calm of an animal that sees hunting as part of how things are, with no cruelty in it. Or the kindness may be the dragonfly's illusion, a friendly look that hides the threat. "One could not fathom" leaves all three readings open, and the general "one" pulls the reader in as a fellow observer who understands more than the young creature does. The verb "gazed" is also a long, steady look, not a snap of attention. The bird is in no hurry.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular metre. The lines vary in length, and the speech of the first stanza reads like natural thought. The form suits the subject. A neat, chiming structure would suggest a tidy world, and this poem is about how little a young mind can see of the world's real shape. The gap after the final line works like a held breath.
The title gives the poem its irony. "Coming of Age" normally promises growth, but here the dragonfly's arrival at adulthood and its arrival in danger seem to be the same moment. The poem does not scold the dragonfly for dreaming. Its plans are vivid and a little endearing, and the bird's gaze may even share that tenderness. What it shows is the distance between how large a young life feels from the inside and how small it looks from the branch above.
That is why the poem lingers. Most of us have made confident plans, and the poem lets us see both the plans and the watcher. It is a miniature fable, and it leaves the reader to decide whether the ending is tragic, natural, or both.