The title promises a creature, but for most of the poem we never meet it. Ram Krishna Singh's "Leeches" begins with a tired voice taking stock, and the word "sucking" arrives only in the very last line. By then the reader has already felt the damage and is finally shown what caused it.
The speaker opens with a cliché, "At the end of the day", and the phrase works doubly. It is the end of a working day, and it is also the end of a working life. Looking back, he sees "my knowledge and insight / rusting with ageing colleagues". Rust is a precise choice. It is not the sudden destruction of fire but slow corrosion, the kind that happens to good tools left unused. His expertise has not failed; it has been neglected. The following lines, "I pity my age and wish / to give up", turn the pity oddly outward. He pities his *age*, as if the era, or the stage of life, were the victim. The poem never names the institution, though "colleagues" and "work" suggest a professional workplace, perhaps a school or university. That vagueness lets the complaint apply to any organisation that wears down its best people.
The second stanza explains why he is giving up: "I can't change / the means and the ends frustrate / the will to work any more". The grammar helps the meaning here. The line break after "frustrate" lets the sentence stumble forward, so the reader feels the will being blocked in mid-motion. Singh sets "means" against "ends" without saying whether the methods are corrupt, the goals are empty, or both. Either way, effort and reward have come apart.
The last stanza is a single long sentence, and it carries the poem's richest imagery. The speaker wants to rest, "burying / ambitions and achievements", and the burial language makes retirement sound like a funeral. The two words are close in sound, both opening with the same vowel, so even his achievements are pulled into the same grave as his ambitions. They "ache the soul" and "make / empty sounds in the hollow / of a hallowed pond". Here the poem turns on a near-rhyme, since "hollow" and "hallowed" differ by little more than a syllable. That small difference holds the whole argument. The pond was once revered, "hallowed", and is now empty at the core. Ponds are also still water, where nothing flows in or out, and where leeches live. The word "leeches" never appears in the text, but it has been waiting in that image all along.
The poem has no rhyme scheme and no regular beat. Its lines are short and uneven, and the stanzas grow from four lines to four to eight, as if the speaker's complaint swells once he finally names the culprits. The accusation is blunt: the pond is "doomed for marrying self-indulgent / elites and idiots". "Marrying" is a striking verb for a bad institutional choice. Marriage implies a bond that is chosen and then hard to undo, so the pond's ruin is something it has committed itself to. The pairing "elites and idiots" ends with a hard, spitting sound, as though the speaker has lost patience with politeness.
The final phrase, "sucking generations", is the poem's sharpest stroke. A leech normally drains one body, but these feed on whole cohorts of people. The present participle, with no full stop in the text as printed, suggests the draining is still going on and will outlast the speaker's retirement. His withdrawal is therefore not just personal. Each person who quits in exhaustion leaves the pond to the parasites.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. It is not a loud protest. Its tone is closer to a weary shrug, and the anger is held in the imagery of rust, burial and hollowness. It also asks an uncomfortable question about where the greater loss lies: in the corrupt people who feed on a system, or in the capable people it teaches to give up.