Most poems announce what the poet has done. Manan Das's "Awaiting" is about what has not happened yet. Its speaker feels something coming, can't make it arrive, and says so in the last line: "I wait." The poem is about the moment before creation, when a poem is a pressure in the chest and not yet words on a page.
Its central image is a paradox. An "explosion" is loud, sudden and destructive, but here it happens "in a bud of lotus" and releases "hundreds of petals" and a "sweet smell." Das takes a violent word and gives it a gentle result. Real flowers open slowly, so calling the opening an explosion squeezes hours into an instant. That fits the experience the poem describes, because inspiration feels sudden even when it has been building for a long time. The lotus is also a flower many cultures link with purity, which prepares the way for the poem's favourite adjective, "virtuous."
The two stanzas are built as a pair. Each begins "Sometimes I feel / An explosion will occur," and the second repeats the first with one change: the setting moves from nature to the self. The bloom first happens in a flower and spreads into "virtuous air." Then it happens "in my breast" and spreads into "virtuous heart." The parallel works like a metaphor laid out in two steps. The bud is to the air what the speaker's chest is to the heart, or to a reader. Even the word "breast," slightly old-fashioned beside the plain wording around it, suggests something kept close and private, about to be opened.
The poem's verbs follow the same pattern. "Spread" appears three times: petals spread, smell spreads, "petals of a poem" spread. The repetition makes the explosion feel more like a widening, a giving-away. In the second stanza the scent disappears and only petals remain, now "petals of a poem." The metaphor has closed the gap between flower and verse. A poem is imagined as something that opens, has parts, and is offered to others.
The form is free verse, with no rhyme and no fixed metre. The lines are short and uneven, closer to breaths than to measured beats. The single word "Then," alone on its line, acts like a held breath or a fuse before the bloom. The ellipsis after "virtuous air... spread sweet smell..." lets the fragrance drift away in mid-sentence. The English is plain and a little unpolished. "As explosion occur in a bud" slips on grammar in a way that reads, to me, as unforced rather than ornate, which suits a poem that values directness over decoration. The soft sounds of "spread," "sweet," "smell" and "petals" also pull against the hard word "explosion," so the poem's sound softens the image it announces.
The tense matters as much as the images. Everything is future or conditional: the explosion "will occur," and the speaker only "feels" it coming. "Sometimes" admits that the feeling is not constant, and perhaps not certain. The speaker does not command the bloom and does not claim to be the gardener. Inspiration is something that happens to the poet, who can only be ready. That makes the poem humble, and it makes the last line, with no adjective, image or punctuation, the quietest and most honest in the text.
A small paradox sits under all this. The poem is called "Awaiting" and ends by saying the poem has not yet arrived, yet we are reading a poem. Either the poem is the bud, a promise of one to come, or the act of waiting has become its own kind of writing. I find the second reading more convincing. By describing the longing so exactly, Das has already produced a few petals.
That is why such a short piece deserves attention. It does not explain creativity. It puts the reader inside the pause before it, with the pressure, the stillness and the patience. The poem also offers a gentle idea of what poetry is for: it should open, spread, and leave something sweet in the air. A reader who has ever waited for the right words, in any kind of writing, will recognise that feeling in the final line, "I wait."