December 26, 2013

Remember the walk you took one early winter morning

November by Ted Hughes

The month of the drowned dog. After long rain the land
Was sodden as the bed of an ancient lake.
Treed with iron and was bird less. In the sunk lane
The ditch – a seep silent all summer –

Made brown foam with a big voice: that, and my boots
On the lanes scrubbed stones, in the gulleyed leaves
Against the hill’s hanging silence;
Mist silvering the droplets on the bare thorns

Slower than the change of daylight.
In a let of the ditch a tramp was bundled asleep.
Face tucked down into beard, drawn in
Under his hair like a hedgehog’s. I took him for dead,

But his stillness separated from the death
From the rotting grass and the ground. The wind chilled,
And a fresh comfort tightened through him,
Each hand stuffed deeper into the other sleeve.

His ankles, bound with sacking and hairy hand,
Rubbed each other, resettling. The wind hardened;
A puff shook a glittering from the thorns,
And again the rains’ dragging grey columns

Smudged the farms. In a moment
The fields were jumping and smoking; the thorns
Quivered, riddled with the glassy verticals.
I stayed on under the welding cold

Watching the tramp’s face glisten and the drops on his coat
Slash and darken. I thought what strong trust
Slept in him- as the trickling furrows slept,
And the thorn roots in their grip on darkness;

And the buried stones taking the weight of winter;
The hill where the hare crouched with clenched teeth.
Rain plastered the land till it was shinning
Like hammered lead, and I ran, and in the rushing wood

Shuttered by a black oak leaned.
The Keeper’s gibbet had owls and hawks
By the neck, weasels, a gang of cats, crows:
Some stiff, weightless, twirled like dry bark bits

In the drilling rain. some still had their shape,
Had their pride with it; hung, chins on chests,
Patient to outwait these worst days that beat
Their crowns bare and dripped from their feet.



December 19, 2013

December 14, 2013

Cosmic

If a diver from outer somewhere
dives into the atmosphere
10000 years from now
he will find inscribed in the caves
and trenches
his own homelessness and loneliness
so that the story shall begin again
of our paths intertwined
so that all the stories will be of me and you only
and maybe in that way together we will be.

while
the buildings and trees come and disappear
like mushrooms
while
the sky changes colour like the northern lights.



(where i end and you begin by radiohead)

December 11, 2013

Landscape

The hillock over there 
With dry turf brooding brown ancient
hollow windy 
and asymmetric 

To all patterns and geometry-
a failed trapezoid 
toppled topology 

The memory of our endeavor
Bringing other memories
One forgetful evening 
The grasses seem ghastly 
Under the halogen lights.

December 10, 2013

Quitters, Inc.

Now that I am trying to quit it seems that nothing comes to an end..the whole attitude of a goodbye is goes missing when you quit. I hope you get me.The alkaloids sort of gagged your sunny hopeful attitude and took you to the safety of  that  interminable unchanging soliloquy heard behind everything.Now without it I feel that there is no way to say goodbye to the conscious now and retreat to that inner world. At least no way in style.

By the way any one trying to quit can consult  Shri Shri Prakash Guru Ghantal Baba Bangali Sealdah Wale .Really helpful.

December 6, 2013

Bengali Intelligentsia (read aantel)

Too often maxims and talismans handed down to us by great men of past become a straightjacket-used by the complacent bureaucratic order  against freedom loving and thinking individuals.So that the very liberal and democratic(a deconstruction of the binary opposites implied is welcome) spirit of the maxim is reversed.


The same is the case with Bengal.Decades after decades of Tagore , Ray , Vivekananda worship have turned their teachings into cliches and deprived the people of any challenging spirit.Who said that you can't be a better poet than Tagore, or a better filmmaker than Ray?.And why treat the Naxalite movement as if it were the  illegitimate  love child of the whole of Bengal? Could it not have been communist  adventurism? The whole growth of Bengal  is stunted by such a decidedly demented mentality.

December 3, 2013

Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think

The years have passed
Taking field notes of  the  hues of the day
The gait of the millipede, the smell  of burnt  hay
And the  occasional measuring of heart beats when she is around.

Thinking that you  are going home
Like  each of the faces on a passing train.
For them
You are  also a passing sight.

Preserving pain as if they were jewellery
In letting go you thought you were wise
But all hope inevitably fall in that precipice
You cannot step into the same river twice.



(The title is the name of an essay by David Foster Wallace )