The English-language poet Jayanta Mahapatra did not begin writing poetry until rather late in life, around the age of 40. At that time, English-language poetry in India read very haltingly
Emphasis on common elements of everyday life - a piece of cloth, a verse of poetry - allows pastoralists in Gujarat to express a memory and yearning for Sindh.
Far away from the mainstream, on the fringes a literary revival is taking place. Let us salute the little magazines.
It is not mainstream literature and the media hype that
On the fork where the Patan roads meet
Before walking to the bridge which lies over a comatose Bagmati, where the roads sleep broken and muddy,
crawling with indifferent slime,
Ammachan, I took the dust of your feet,
you inhaled the scent of my hair.
Fingering the tulasi plant of Rama Vilas
you stood quietly
while I flung stones at
I believed in quarks
and DNA
stones bleeding
and ash
tumbling from a holy
palm
within this ripe wound
I build a temple without end from within this open shell
The man who runs the sports goods store
that also sells old unopened books and
board games in faded boxes, sits with his
tattooed arms folded in the sun.
Pathaney Khan, who died on 9 March 2000, was one of the most popular singers of Pakistan, a flagbearer of a tradition going back a thousand years. During his lifetime,
Yashodhara-I
Already she feels herself
recede in his consciousness,
as if she were an idea
to which he had once
paid lip-service,
or a distant place
he had once visited
I.
Single cloud impaled
on a mallard´s cry
I sit
out of range
across a lotus pond
centre of breath
for a tropical Monet
grown silent, eye-hand-brush watching
great
I.
Beware, my sons, of towns founded by gold-miners,
now abandoned in the saddle of a valley.
Before long, parting ways with your muleteers,
you´ll stumble on routes
no
