Most of us have stood at a funeral or hospital door and said the right thing. Balachandran V's "Really" asks what lies behind those right things. Its answer is uncomfortable: much of the sympathy we offer may be more comfortable for us than useful to the person grieving, and the closeness we claim may not exist.
The poem begins with a question that sounds warm: "Isn't it a pleasure / To offer succor?" The word "pleasure" is the first crack. Helping others should be a duty or a kindness, but here it is something we enjoy, perhaps because it makes us feel good about ourselves. The speaker's "Oh yes, we are so genuine" is heavy with irony, and the sly aside "we say" in "Feeling, we say, the same pain and sorrow" turns sympathy into something spoken, a performance. By the end of the stanza the speaker admits doubt: "sometimes I wonder if we really do."
The second stanza goes further. The language of mourning is formal and a little old-fashioned: "condole," "kith or kin," "the flippancy of fate." Alliteration smooths these phrases into something ceremonial and rehearsed, much like the condolences themselves. Then the speaker asks the poem's most daring question: is the feeling "regret or relief"? The answer arrives in a halting line broken by commas: "Regret for them and secretly, guiltily, / Relief that we have been spared for now?" The adverbs "secretly" and "guiltily" admit what people rarely say aloud, and "for now" adds a shadow, since the same blow could land on us later.
The third stanza changes direction. A friend tells the speaker, "Take it easy! Be cool! / Heavens won't come falling down!" This is the same easy comfort the poem has been questioning, now aimed at the speaker. The reply is physical, the only strong image in the poem: the speaker tries "to loosen my facial muscles / Taut like strings of a tennis racket." The comparison is exact. A racket string is tightened until it hums under pressure, so the face is under strain. Judging by this image, the speaker's unease is real, and his body seems to refuse the calm the friend recommends. It also hints that the doubts in the earlier stanzas are not cold cynicism but come from a troubled conscience.
The final stanza turns on a repeated word. "Easy" appeared in the friend's advice, and now it returns three times: "How easy to comfort others / How easy to say 'I understand' / How easy to say 'I am with you'." The repetition builds like a drumbeat, and each phrase is one we might say automatically. The stanza then breaks with the single word "When really," which echoes the title and the earlier "really do." After the long, smooth run of "How easy," the closing line lands with a jolt: "We are eons away from each other!" "Eons" measures distance in time rather than space, as if no amount of travelling could cross the gap between one person's suffering and another's sympathy. The exclamation mark makes it a cry of frustration as much as a conclusion.
The poem is in free verse, with no regular rhyme or fixed metre. That suits a speaker who is thinking aloud and distrusts polished phrases. Line lengths vary and the stanzas shrink from six lines to seven, then four, then five, so the poem tightens as its argument sharpens. The shifting pronouns matter too. The speaker says "we" throughout, apart from "I" in the stanza about the friend, and so never lets himself stand outside the accusation. He is not scolding other people but including himself.
That honesty is what makes the poem worth reading. It does not tell us to stop offering comfort. It asks us to be truthful about its limits and about our own mixed motives. The poem implies that admitting the distance between people may be the first step toward actually crossing it.