Post Mortem – a poem by Gieve Patel

 Post Mortem – a poem by Gieve Patel

I request readers to read the poem first from the link above and then only my review. Thanks.

At the outset the poem Post Mortem is camouflaged like an ordinary straight free verse. The entire poem reads in detail how the internal organs of an old man are pulled out of a cut outer and checked and simply pushed back into the enclosure, the dead body. It’s very difficult to single out one strong message of this poem. The poem is multilayered. It laments about the very irony in the process of Post Mortem lasting for an hour or two, during which a span of seven decades of life isn’t felt even for a second. The crudeness the process demands mocks at the decades long nonstop activities of all the internal organs; in short bullshits the personality and person these organs and skin kept alive briskly active, like the fingers of a puppet show man. Philosophically an illusion personified is the body. Poetically the surgeon completing the process of Post Mortem is our fellow being. He knows these organs are so crucially working nonstop for his own self. Nonetheless it is after all a simple method to find out the cause of the death; there is nothing more to it in anyway. Our fellow being feels nothing but an urgent need for disposal of the body when a life ends. Patel probably reminds us if at all our fellow beings’ lives and aspirations, pains and activities matter to us, we need to share the fraternity and belonging when one is alive and not mourn lavishly as if only his death was holding all the compassion back. The poem stands out for its subtlety, multi layered content and powerful expression.