The speaker of Balachandran V's "Beginnings of a New Day" lies in bed and watches a papaya tree. The poem is dated Trivandrum, 28 November 2009, and it reads like a diary entry, a few minutes of looking set down while the details were fresh. The scene is small, but it holds a quiet change of heart. The speaker starts by mourning stolen fruit and ends up glad of the morning.
The first stanza sets the stage with a hush. The two green barbets are "silent, so unusual", and the speaker clearly knows them as birds that usually make a racket. The imagery is quick and visual: "a flurry of green wings", then "heads cocked" as the pair size up the "ripe, yellow Papaya". Green against yellow gives the opening a clean, bright palette. The cocked heads make the birds seem like shoppers inspecting produce, which is the first hint of the poem's gentle humour.
That humour sharpens in the short second stanza. "To lie on bed and watch birds in the morning!" is pure pleasure, but the next lines sour it. "One nibbling on one and the other on the other" is a neat, slightly tongue-twisting line, with the repeated "one" and "other" showing the birds' perfect fairness to each other. Then comes the speaker's mock-tragic cry: "Pity me! The fruits I had hoped to pluck today!" The exclamation marks and the comic self-pity tell us the loss is not really a heartbreak.
The woodpecker's arrival changes the scene. He "hopped down", and the speaker's puzzled question, "what business / Does he dare here", is split across a line break, as though the speaker is also caught off guard. The woodpecker is called the "nemesis / Of worms and termites", a grand phrase for a bird that turns out to be after fruit. The barbets are "awed" by his red crest and sharp beak. The speaker finds him funny, noting "how funnily he sat on the stem, so unlike birds!" Calling him "the 'Pecker", with the apostrophe and quotation marks, gives him a cheeky, nickname-like familiarity. By the time he leaves, "Filled", he is "the mighty Woodpecker", and the title now sounds mock-heroic.
The speaker's position shifts here too. The barbet that stays "watched him, like me, head cocked". That phrase echoes the opening, where the barbets studied the fruit with cocked heads, and now the speaker is made a fellow watcher. The man who wanted to pluck the papayas has become an audience member, just like the bird.
The form suits this relaxed mood. There is no rhyme and no fixed metre. The stanzas run to four lines, three, five, five and two, and the lines vary in length like ordinary speech. Dashes break the sentences into hops and pauses, close to the movement of the birds. The sounds sometimes echo the action, as in the hard consonants of "Jabbing away", which almost picks at the page. The repeated "ripe yellow Papaya" loses its comma the second time, as if the phrase has become familiar, and the fruit has become part of the shared scene.
The ending is deliberately small. The woodpecker leaves "the rest for the Barbet", and the speaker is not mentioned at all. The loss is simply accepted. In the last two lines, "I reach for the music – happy at the signs / Of the new day to come", the birds have been silent throughout, so the music may fill the quiet they left. That is an inference, but the contented tone is plain. The poem's modest significance is that it shows how paying attention can turn annoyance into pleasure. A ruined harvest becomes a morning's entertainment, and the poem suggests that this is a good way to begin a day.