Don’t look down on the drunkards who perish
befuddling their sorrows with wine:
you don’t hate the flowers that flourish
light-headed in morning sunshine.
The eyes of the ladies attract us
to the high drunken rapture of passion;
their kisses are Bacchus’s nectars –
our lips are in thrall to sensation.
Drunk with light goes Ophelia, sunken
in the gloom of a desolate plain;
the priest at the altar is drunken
with the blood of a god that is slain,
like the poet who gazes unblinking
at the boundless blue eye of the main.
Let some sad trumpeter stand
on the empty streets at dawn
and blow a silver chorus to the
the buildings of Times Square
memorial of ten years, at 5 A.M., with
the thin white moon just
visible
above the green & grooking McGraw
Hill offices
a cop walks by, but he’s invisible
with his music
The Globe Hotel, Garver lay in
gray beds there and hunched his
back and cleaned his needles―
where I lay many nights on the nod
from his leftover bloody cottons
and dreamed of Blake’s voice talking―
I was lonely,
hotel’s vanished into a parking lot
And I’m back here―sitting on the streets
again―
The movies took our language, the
great red signs
A DOUBLE BILL OF GASSERS
Teen Age Nightmare
Hooligans of the Moon
But we were never nightmare
hooligans but seekers of
the blond nose for Truth
Some old men are still alive, but
the old Junkies are gone―
We are a legend, invisible but
legendary, as prophesied.
In honor of Mihavir Jayanti, we present this work by one of India’s greatest 20th century poets.
Dilip Chitre Indian 1938 – 2009
My father travels on the late evening train
Standing among silent commuters in the yellow light
Suburbs slide past his unseeing eyes
His shirt and pants are soggy and his black raincoat
Stained with mud and his bag stuffed with books
Is falling apart. His eyes dimmed by age
fade homeward through the humid monsoon night.
Now I can see him getting off the train
Like a word dropped from a long sentence.
He hurries across the length of the grey platform,
Crosses the railway line, enters the lane,
His chappals are sticky with mud, but he hurries onward.
Home again, I see him drinking weak tea,
Eating a stale chapati, reading a book.
He goes into the toilet to contemplate
Man’s estrangement from a man-made world.
Coming out he trembles at the sink,
The cold water running over his brown hands,
A few droplets cling to the greying hairs on his wrists.
His sullen children have often refused to share
Jokes and secrets with him. He will now go to sleep
Listening to the static on the radio, dreaming
Of his ancestors and grandchildren, thinking
Of nomads entering a subcontinent through a narrow pass.
The angels the angels in the sky
One’s dressed as an officer
One’s dressed as a chef today
And the others sing
Fine sky-coloured officer
Sweet Spring when Christmas is long gone
Will deck you with a lovely sun
A lovely sun
The chef plucks geese
Ah! Snowfalls hiss
Fall and how I miss
My beloved in my arms
Outside the afterlight’s lucent rose
Is smiting the hills and brimming the valleys,
And shadows are stealing across the snows;
From the mystic gloom of the pineland alleys.
Glamour of mingled night and day
Over the wide, white world has sway,
And through their prisoning azure bars,
Gaze the calm, cold eyes of the early stars.
But here, in this long, low-raftered room,
Where the blood-red light is crouching and leaping,
The fire that colors the heart of the gloom
The lost sunshine of old summers is keeping¬
The wealth of forests that held in fee
Many a season’s rare alchemy,
And the glow and gladness without a name
That dwells in the deeps of unstinted flame.
Gather we now round the opulent blaze
With the face that loves and the heart that rejoices,
Dream we once more of the old-time days,
Listen once more to the old-time voices!
From the clutch of the cities and paths of the sea
We have come again to our own roof-tree,
And forgetting the loves of the stranger lands
We yearn for the clasp of our kindred’s hands.
There are tales to tell, there are tears to shed,
There are children’s flower-faces and women’s sweet laughter;
There’s a chair left vacant for one who is dead
Where the firelight crimsons the ancient rafter;
What reck we of the world that waits
With care and clamor beyond our gates,
We, with our own, in this witching light,
Who keep our tryst with the past tonight?
Ho! how the elf-flames laugh in glee!
Closer yet let us draw together,
Holding our revel of memory
In the guiling twilight of winter weather;
Out on the waste the wind is chill,
And the moon swings low o’er the western hill,
But old hates die and old loves burn higher
With the wane and flash of the farmhouse fire.
In honor of the festival of Dr. Amdekar Jayanti, we present this work by a great 20th century Indian poet.
Kamala Surayya Indian 1934 – 2009
At sunset, on the river ban, Krishna
Loved her for the last time and left…
That night in her husband’s arms, Radha felt
So dead that he asked, What is wrong,
Do you mind my kisses, love? And she said,
No, not at all, but thought, What is
It to the corpse if the maggots nip?
If I forgive and ignore your coldness,
How can I be free of the memory of you.
Your gaze is dear. The heart has no price.
Tell me to forget, have pity on me,
Or tell me to come.
Come drink this glass with me.
Snow and silence rest on the coast
The waves are motionless on the sand
And the wind – an unmanned boat.
Remnants of an oar
And a spider.
Who can ignite joy in my eyes?
Who can awaken the giant?
Who dies?
The smell of death in the garden
Mocks the seasons
And you, my girlfriend,
A choke and a tear in the virgin’s eye.
Sounds of footsteps on the debris
Search for the truth
For a dagger, for a protective arm.
Deep down in my wounds
The eagle’s feathers were
A voice and a silence
That yearn for the beats of drums
For a shower of rain
To water its palate,
And the (wrestling) ring
Is a soft cloud
That hovers around the horses’ missteps.
Go back with my remains
My blood did not anticipate its course.
Who awaits the dawn and is impatient to arrive?
Who has clung to the rock of my speculations?
Who has stretched his beak out
Towards my eyes?
Oh robber of the torch
There is clamour in silence.
Pick up the daisies of light
In tenacious obscurity.
We sought silence in caves
For impurities cannot be purged by words
Let’s dive beneath waves and rocks.
Surely there is a flicker of light at the bottom
Turn it into a spark
That rescues the wind
From the chains of silence
And teaches humanity how to die!
Poets Corner 