‘Blessing’
By Imtiaz Dharker

The skin cracks like a pod.
There never is enough water.
Imagine the drip of it, the small splash, echo in a tin mug, the voice of a kindly god.
Sometimes, the sudden rush of fortune. The municipal pipe bursts, silver crashes to the ground and the flow has found a roar of tongues. From the huts, a congregation: every man woman child for streets around butts in, with pots, brass, copper, aluminum, plastic buckets, frantic hands,
And naked children screaming in the liquid sun, their highlights polished to perfection, flashing light, as the blessing sings over their small bones.

I want to start off with a question:

Blessings: do we take them for granted?

Benjamin Franklin once said, “When the well’s dry, we know the worth of water”. This quote reveals the way in which humans take things for granted and then realise its value once it disappears.

In this poem, a burst water pipe in the Dharavi slum of India causes great excitement for inhabitants as they are often lacking access to it. A theme that DIRECTLY relates to the text is that of “We do not fully appreciate an item until it becomes rare”. In the arid conditions of Mumbai, water is viewed as a precious commodity and every single drop of the liquid is considered a miraculous blessing. Water is like currency, it’s like money. In a hot country in that kind of climate, it’s like a gift. Dharker uses a combination of literary techniques in order to make first-world readers wonder how much they take for granted in their daily lives. While we – with our bathtubs, taps, flushing toilets and bottled water – use water everyday without giving it much thought, there are many who battle to live with an inadequate supply everyday.

The poet’s choice of enunciation supports the extended metaphor of water being a gift