Poet’s Note: ‘Chaos in the outside world relevant to my poetry’
I painfully realize that the poetry I’ve written (and much has been published in the last fifty years) has been restricted perhaps to the apparently colloquial narrative poem, which meditates on not so much of reality, but struggles to go deep into the nothingness that surrounds us in this world of ours. I have suffered this, but have truly gone nowhere. Talking about what this poetry reveals is difficult; chaos in the outside world has always been a challenge, but seems to be relevant to the poetry I’ve done. Many of my first poems were thematically on the temple town of Puri, which has been the lifeline of the Odia people for centuries. It has been a subject poets in Odisha have never been able to resist. For all of us, I’d say. Puri remains a difficult question for all time and demands a long answer. It’s not for me to comment if the poems in this slim volume have any answers in the poems’ solitudes. Suffice it to say that it is all part of the journey I began years and years ago.
From Sky Without Sky: The Puri Poems, Poetrywala, 2018
I
This is the Indian in me.
Where does it all begin?
When the dying sun bleeds
the galvanized-iron sky orange,
when a dark absence leads one away
to the side of time where the dead walk,
and where the one leftover eye
lies awake in the long night
When hope becomes a bird of prey,
motionless, hanging above the good earth
as if it were its sole guardian,
when we don’t like ourselves,
when there is so little physical unlikeness
between one thing and another
And when the first step towards
the time of rest becomes the longest walk,
the endless landscape of thought
breathes a kind of music.
II
Perhaps I am trying to think
of an aspirin pill
about to dissolve in a glass of water
or a monotonous metallic voice
dispersing in a deserted platform at night
So nothing else would exist
But a life, any life, if it is lived:
a map of a country one has never visited
and to find one’s way in
one needs only know how to read the map
The snapping of the consciousness
to find a freedom
which could exist in a body
without parts of ourselves
And if I hear a sound like music
unlike any music I had heard
was it an answer
all the arguments in the world
can do very little about,
like a flurry of crows that rise
from a stubble-field and settle
on the boughs of unconsciousness?
III
Whether any answer attracts or not
it is within one
that it is born
A kind of music
Nothing that one can hear
in the silence everywhere
and then more silence
Reaching forward to that silence
I live
for that moment
when all thought
could achieve a vital synthesis
IV
Because you’re there.
Because you make me forget
the wasteland encircling us
and which I still cannot.
After all that’s been said,
all that’s been done,
all that has been thought, dreamt,
fashioned, built, chanted —
so much faith spent
and then faith can be no more.
And because I can still hear
the faint flutter of birds
in the tree
that stood in the depth of my heart
The essay and the poems are part of our Poetry Special Issue (January 2021), curated by Shireen Quadri and Nawaid Anjum. © The Punch Magazine. No part of this essay or the new poems exclusively featured here should be reproduced anywhere without the prior permission of The Punch Magazine.
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