For days he fed on silence;
heard Nehru shout
his Tryst With Destiny1
from howling bathroom taps;
and believed a day would come
when either of Bill Gates’
and his piece of sky
when integrated2 from
one horizon to the other
would give the same world.
Like scriptures he read
aloud
Paash3 and Neruda.
Recited A Request for Exclusion4
in a contest of patriotic poems.
The judges disqualified him mid-way;
his classmates called him a fool.
Then cutting through
the slumber of Time
when spring showed up, of late,
‘longwith the trees heavy with flowers
Buddha drooped in the west.
With all his heart, he suspected
instead of fruits this year
serpents would ripen on branches.
Nothing happened though.
From the frail figure,
he begged pardon;
dumped the flowers, birds and stars
in the farthest corner of his mind;
and wrote that night a poem.
Metre, rhyme, caution,
all gone.
Bare ribs holding the sword.
1. Tryst With Destiny was the speech delivered by the first Prime Minister of India, Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru, when India became a free nation on August 15, 1947.
2. (Calculus) A higher mathematical process in which a big body is presumed to be made up of a number of similar infinitesimally small divisions.
3. Paash (1950-1988), leading poet of the Jujharu (rebel) era of Punjabi poetry. His works include the poetry books Loh-Katha, Urde Baazan Magar, Sadde Samiyan Vich and Khilre Hoye Varke (compiled after his death). Paash was murdered in 1988 in his home-village by the Khalistanis (Punjabi separatists).
4. Paash’s poem written after the assassination of Indira Gandhi, in which he urges he be not included in the India that Rajiv Gandhi had inherited from his mother.
(First published in The Journal of the Poetry Society (India), Vol. 12, No. 1, Summer 2001.)
