Desicritics Category: Culture: Poetry

Poem: Only The Light

Kashkin — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 10:42:31 EDT

Absent and not in view
The golden words of our past
Still there, an old craving to explore
Only in view, the shackles of time
The separation of days from its demise
As I write, to form a soul
Of once that was, now a dream

As I labor to turn,
The old wheels of fortune
In the land of my ancestors and poets
Only the words I have
At my disposal and at my service
As I rotate with the earth and its burdens
Through labyrinth of time and space
Not guilty my conscience and my soul
Of all my crimes, still there some peace
Always in debt to serve, in tattered clothes
The land up in smoke and in fury of hatred

When will you awake, from this slumber?
Of mayhem and of shames,
What will you do to these traditions of past
The murderous routines and ghastly crimes
The future is yours, belongs it to you
Only the steps, you need to take
Silence is a crime if you chose to remain
In surrender to the desires of the world
The glory will come, only if you refrain
From these acts of crime, to your land
Plenty of enemies in view but it's within
Distinguish it well, as there it remains
The clues to your success and dreams

Hold it well and keep it close
The memories of your past
The promise of the future
Shine, my friends, shine
As it is in there you will find
The story of your being and its land
Do not wait or hope for others to come
Summon your souls and bodies to perform
The miracles of change, the miracle of unity
It's time for you to form a soul
Still there, an old craving to explore
In shackles of time and despair of days
Only the light, only the light, in your fate

Poessay: Honesty and Trust

temporal — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 22:01:07 EDT

San's favourite phrase once used to be 'to be honest...' I would wince and say under the breadth "wohi tau" in the acerbic tone of the actor in the sit-com 'office office'.

Why must honesty precede with vocal reaffirmations? Are we less honest without such declarations?

Or are such 'warnings' part of some nefarious truth in advertising or packaging guideline revelations?

Truth has a way of penetrating armour. It does not need a preamble nor a warning. We can feel its piercing pain if it is unpleasant (which it mostly is).

Have you noticed when things do not affect us directly we can afford to be brutally truthful? I call it the BSS - Bitch-Slut Syndrome. (according to the narrator one who sleeps around is a bitch, but if she does not sleep with the narrator then she turns into a slut.)

And when there is a remote chance of it affecting us or a person dear to us than we embellish it with sugar coats. Like David Frum in that essay in the Newsweek where he wanted to bash Rush Limbaugh and blast him into space: but being Barbara's son he stepped around that ardent wish. Oh, he may be a drug addict, philanderer, has several failed marriages, jets in a private plane, is obnoxious, irrational, overweight, but he has a voice and we must respect it as one of the several voices in the republican fold.

We mention rationality, justification, weather, conditions, considerations doing the amazing tap dance on needle head to reveal the truth while trying not to upset ourselves or another person.

***

janay kaun dekhay ga
muskurati aankhion
kay chalakhtay aansoo

(who'd witness
the downpour
of smiling eyes)

Drop by drop, they fall, and morph into layers of disregard...mingling, partying, disappearing, re appearing, fading in euphemisms of memories labeled as past...distant or near...

I wrote reappearing...as in mujh se pehli si mohabbat m'ray mehboob na maang

Is the lover demanding it? Or is it the flutter of heartbeats ignited at a chance encounter with the past lover? A flicker of flame that was once a fire?

But as Faiz continues:

aur bhee dukh haiN zamaanay meiN muhabbat ke sivaa
raahateN aur bhi vas'l ki raahat ke sivaa
mujh se pehli si mohabbat meray mehbub na maaNg

There are heartaches aplenty (in the world) other than those of love
There is peace and joy aplenty other than the ecstacy of love
Don't ask me to rekindle that love, O Love

To be honest, agar maaNg bhee lay tou bura kiya hay. Dil ko achcha lagay ga. [tr: to be honest, even if the lover is reminiscing about lost love it has a nice feel about it.]

Trust me!

Do You Remember Those Caves? A Poetry Film on Gwalior

Amitabh Mitra — Sat, 7 Mar 2009 00:26:12 EST

do you remember those caves

at the foot of the fort

where we used to play

and the old cemetery

we once hid from the sun

and hordes of maratha warriors

cascading behind a broken window

hunting relentlessly

for stolen moments.

the heart was then a street

pursuing days and nights

and a subdued sky

hid a longforgotten secret.

imprisoned

we traveled the eyes

and hopes

of another day.

Poetry, Art and Film by Amitabh Mitra

Poem: Nightingale of Pukhtoonwala (Rehman Baba)

Kashkin — Fri, 6 Mar 2009 07:08:13 EST

Here he rests
The old nightingale
In its peace and grave,
From the descendants
Of an old tribe and its code
The old settlers, at the outskirts
Through years of travel
The poet, in mausoleum of words

The old Pushtu poet
Carried in his words,
The echoes of peace and music
The Old Sufi
Carried in his soul,
The echoes of unity and humility
From the old rivers to its tribes
The imagination that were to capture
For centuries across the time
The old love affair,
With land and its descendants
Now lies in ruins, his words,
The resting place, in holes

Call they themselves
The proponents of change
By destruction and rope,
By death and by smoke
The old echoes still there,
In those fallen grounds
Live I not in the mausoleum
But in those hearts
Of millions that came,
And millions that are now
Never will you succeed,
I am them and they are me,
Bounded by the music
And the legends of this place
Mountains are my witness
And my words, the echo
Of distant past and now yours,

What is it you gained, if gain it is you say,
Maimed you have the old past and its land
The brutality of invaders to the heart that is stone
Inside you, as you have killed yourself
Worry not for me, but for the future ahead
I will always be there in my words
See you must with your own soul
Those moments of peace
As I hear your footsteps in my awake
I am already dead, what more can you do
Killed you have yourself, as I cry for you
In my words, in my land, of distant times
Now the playground, for devil to claim
The imaginary stakes and the real crimes
Remember, it's in you, the old music
Claim it, the nightingales of time!

Poetry: And I Knew Him

Amitabh Mitra — Mon, 2 Mar 2009 09:49:45 EST

I knew him
The black man playing a recorder
At a Boksburg street junction.
Every day
He played the tale of sun set blood
Of the fear of white rain gods
Of a hope of the train from Soweto
Might stop
Running over him ever since he was born
He never asked for money
Only the landscape that
Once belonged to him.
One day
He never came back.
His place trampled
By a new founded
Sky.

Photograph - Apartheid Museum, National Archives, Pretoria

Poem by Amitabh Mitra

Poem: Oxygen

Kashkin — Sun, 1 Mar 2009 01:32:39 EST

Let the rhythms of this existence
In this time and space,
And the dimensions unknown
Find you, as you grow old
Of thousands years in between
Through knowledge and wisdom

Remain in place of all that is,
Awaits you, these moments
Of mirth and glory
Remain in place, around you
Your home, where you roam
As those lions in Serengeti

Let the happiness find you
As you find all, the world
Through these celestial skies
The celebration,
The moments of arrival
As the adventure begins
Of life and of its memories!

poetry: Coward, Coward, Burning Bright

temporal — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 10:17:17 EST

sorry dee, (and sorry W B)

Coward, coward, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame taliban symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of your idiocies?
On what wings dare you aspire?
What delusions dare seize the fire?

And what twisted and crazy thought
Could screw the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy loins began to beat,
What dread hand and what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the sickle? What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And water'd heaven with their tears,
Did He smile His work to see?
Did He who made the saints make thee?

Chuddi, chuddi, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame taliban symmetry?

Poetry: Roadkill On Memory Lane

IdeaSmith — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 05:55:50 EST

Did you ever hear the call of memory
that screeching wail of nostalgia
like tires on tar
and you couldn't help looking back,
wondering if anybody died
and realising it wasn't you?

Did you turn back to proceed
and gape at the unfamiliarity of now
the past and its accidents seem so much real
and feel yourself lose footing on the road of reality
while even the blood stains from yesterday's carnage
fade away before you can grasp them?

Did you ever walk back into your past
and then find yourself lost,
not knowing how to come back
- Nostalgia is so disorienting -
and while you're frozen in your own mind
you get hit by a flood of something you never saw coming?

Maybe forgetfulness is just a way of ensuring we don't become roadkill.

Susmit Bose, A Maestro of Indo-English Music

Amitabh Mitra — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 06:16:04 EST

I came across Susmit Bose one afternoon on a hot summer day at Delhi sometime in 1978. I am not sure of the year and it might be even before that. Delhi was my favourite hunting ground, hunting for poetry books, trying to sell my poetry book, hunting to fall in love again and again, it was all about love and poetry as it is still now. I have actually never met him till today.

We have a mutual friend who owns a busy café cum gift shop just below Indian Oil Bhavan on Janpath. It is there that I found Susmit Bose’s Long Playing Vinyl Record ‘Train to Calcutta’. Susmit Bose was going to be with me for the next thirty years. I have carried his LP wherever I went. This is one of my most treasured items.

Delhi of the seventies was different. Poetry and Music were emerging in an aroma of genuine Indianess. JS ‘The magazine that thinks young ‘ edited by the maverick Desmond Doig in the seventies was organising music concerts in Kolkata and bringing beat groups from Shillong, Kohima, Darjeeling, Bombay and New Dehi. Indo English Poetry had already taken roots in New Delhi. Reciting poetry near the tea shop next to Godavari at Jawaharlal Nehru University was a regular feature. Evenings and Poetry merged together in unforgettable nights. I feel proud to have been a part of that period.

Susmit Bose came as a sudden storm with simple lyrics that got embedded in permanency.He wrote on his album,

‘These songs convey my sentiments and interpretations of situations around me. I am not trying to preach in my songs but want to share my feelings with you. Having experimented in serious forms in folk music, there are two songs in this album which are the results of this experiment. They are both beautiful songs. The ‘Baul’ ( the folk song of Bengal) written by Kazi Nazrul Islam has had a great impact on me. Viva La Quinte Brigada is a song of the Spanish civil War and has been recorded before by someone whom I regard with great respect - Pete Seeger. I take this opportunity to thank all who helped me to make this dream of recording come true especially Bob Dylan who inspired me a great deal in my music.’

My favourite has always been his song whose lyrics go like this –

I wrote this song

On a Sunday morn

On a train to Calcutta bound

Of a boy who was travelling all alone

The sun went up and all was well

Till the man in the uniform

Was checking all the tickets

And was smiling

A sudden frown came on his face

As he saw the boy around…..

Susmit Bose is now known as an Urban Folk Balladeer. He sings about social issues in English to Indian audiences. His latest song on Binayak Sen, a doctor imprisoned in Chattisgarh created as much furore as my poem on him. A talented filmmaker, he’s produced several successful television shows for Doordarshan, Surabhi, a show on Indian culture being amongst the best-known. He has also released documentary films like Akha Teej on child marriage; A Revival on traditional medicine, For Who; Man Of Heart on the bauls, for IGNCA (Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts). He also arranged the song Hum Honge Kamyab with Anil Biswas and has led the All India Radio Choir. He’s performed in international folk music concerts from Cuba to Berlin, and has sung with folk music legends like Pete Seeger in the US and Canada. He has also performed with Paul Horn, an internationally acclaimed flautist, for a US/UK project on world music.

How do you speak of freedom?

When your thoughts are so in chains

How do you see the rainbow?

Without the rain(Certain Thoughts, Public Issue, 2005)

Whenever I travel to India, I make it a point to visit the café and ask my friend about Susmit. All of us have grown old and today on my birthday I put his vinyl disc on the player and listen to his immortal songs. What a better way to celebrate a birthday by listening to a giant of Indo-English Music. I remember I had penned a few lines in 1979 –

Connaught Place Blues

We had once walked around Connaught place for hours
Trying to solve a puzzle
Of a day in its stately columns
Holding aloft the far shores
Of an unfamiliar sky
Morning of jigsaw pieces in The Book Worm or
Keventers
Mind shopping at the pavement
For love poems
Rushing to embrace
Colors, lips
At a backthought corridor in
Dhoomimal Gallery
Our legs ached
Going round and round
Just trying to be somewhere
Until the one legged man in Dass Studios
Appeared from nowhere
As Sushmit Bose’s voice from the gramophone
Bent down to pick us
Loving was an afternoon
In a season that finally fell in its
Rightful place.

Shaleen Singh's unusual poetry, Proprietary Pains

Amitabh Mitra — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 05:33:18 EST

Shaleen Singh belongs to a small town of Budaun in the province of Uttar Pradesh in India. Post Colonial Poetry in India came in varied extent from the metropolis. Yes, there is definitely an invisible bond in ones creativity to the town or village of residence. The rustic surroundings of Budayun have influenced Shaleen’s poetry to a certain level.

The Indo-English Poetry Movement that dominated with a few names from the sixties to eighties has lost the anarchy that it professed. Instead poets like Shaleen Singh have brought their own vivid and iconoclastic imagery that defies any norm of poetry, grammar and even English. It is a poetry that is truly Indian. His poems are ultimate, radical and spoken in two or three words. They are like the hot wind that blows so often in summer at Budayun. Its searing effect is reflected on words that are immediate, poetry that seems to grow unhindered in unusual circumstances like the old Banyan tree in his house at Budayun.

Cover Watercolor by Amitabh Mitra, Poets Printery Publishing, South Africa