FOUR POEMS
By
Jayanta Mahapatra
Re-Markings Vol. 5 No.2 September 2006
Fruit
Tart green
pods
hang from
the tamarind tree.
The wonder
of sweetness
builds
through the leaves.
Long
shadows spring out
of nowhere
as I watch.
The storm
has come and passed,
visible
still on the horizon.
Today I feel
I am surrounded
by a wall
of dead fruit;
they are
unconcerned
of how I
have lived my life.
They seem
to insist
I am a
traveller lost in the dark
and that
the strange ceremony
which once
began in darkness
is like
the lonely mountain wind
over the
grasses.
When I
walk up the slope,
a slow
thirst for happiness
seeks the
worn doorsill
where my
dead mother had sat,
as she
sternly forbade us
to pluck
the fruit
childhood’s
sunrise had shaped
so
temptingly for our eyes.
Poem of the Sleepless Nights
The crucifix
on the wall holds
a body of
humiliating husks.
Rain runs
down the callused windows of our sleep.
There is
this tale of the unhappy woman
With her
body willing to be burnt to death
and the
child born blind
with the
enormous eyes of sunlight
guarding
the secrets of the sky.
All I’ve
wanted to do was to spy on God
all my
life, to feel empty and light,
but our
pains met merely on long sleepless nights.
A Disturbed Sky
The lewd
calls of a caged parrot at dawn.
I can
never know what its voice is searching for.
The
sunlight crawls down the householder’s spine
while the
immensities of space are numb with silence.
The voices
that are heard in the garden
hold
plausible lies. The rice is more golden than ever,
the
jasmines are whiter, and the goodbyes of mothers to their young who die without
reason are louder.
I’ve
searched everywhere and found nothing there.
Not even
the place where I heard those voices.
There’s
only something like a sky with sunken cheeks sitting on the arm of the chair
staring at me.
Mother lay
in her last illness a walking distance away,
her feeble
voice walking against the wind.
Today my
sky is the last thing I’ll ever know:
this sky
of voices suffering the retribution
of an
unseen purpose’s vengeance
that knows
nothing can move it
like the
sun, here or ever.
The Years
Like
leaves returning to the tree,
the past
years sprout green;
so much
love spent at times,
and a poet
loses sight of love
because he
loads his life with words.
Again and
again the pigeons fly back,
Planning
their small strategies,
Choosing
slender weeds from the ground.
Awake and
sleeping,
I feel
their exhaustion.
I thought
I saw my words
wanting to
leave my memory,
and knew
my poem had no meaning.
But the
years continue to exist
in their
glass tower with the veiled view,
with the
kiss not taken,
and the
word afraid of being no more.
And these
years lie in the future,
and we do
not know it.
Words are
as far away as their pain.
In the
thick cashew groves
Policemen
pick up the last clues
of a young
woman’s murder; they know
this is
not the real end of the story.
Padma Shri Jayanta Mahapatra, Physicist
and Poet, holds the distinction of being the first Indian poet in English
to have received the Sahitya Akademi Award (1981) for Relationship. His
other volumes include Close the Sky, Ten by Ten, Svayamvara & Other
Poems, A Father's Hours, Temple, A Rain of Rites, Waiting, The False
Start, Life Signs, Dispossessed Nests, A Whiteness of Bone, Burden of
Waves and Fruit and Bare Face. He writes in English and Oriya. He adorns Re-Markings as a distinguished member of its Advisory Board. www.re-markings.com
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