Dilip Chitre

Rating: 4.33
Rating: 4.33

Dilip Chitre Poems

My father travels on the late evening train
Standing among silent commuters in the yellow light
Suburbs slide past his unseeing eyes
...

In the light of birds the lunatic wakes from uncountable sleeps
His burning electric wires begin to glow
Birds sing in every forest of flesh and blood
The lunatic's fingers turn into strings in the outer silence
...

I had promised you a poem before I died
Diamonds storming out of the blackness of a piano
Piece by piece I fall at my own dead feet
...

Like a painting by Velazquez
A woman stands
Alone in the frame
...

At midnight in the bakery at the corner
While bread and butter-biscuits are being baked
I remember the Rahman of my childhood
...

The house of my childhood stood empty
On a grey hill
All its furniture gone
...

I am backing home where you died.
One year later, to find
Changes that mask our surrender
To the inevitability of life.
...

Hidden in my skull are the caves where the endless
Reticular frescoes of my awesome childhood Unroll.
...

Determined to tell lies
People are able only to tell the truth -
Said Rahman
...

Through her blood's lightly layered
Hazy darkness
Lightning flashes out branches of my being
When, through intoxicated wet leaves
...

It's all mixed up: Vladimir, Yaroslav,
The skeletons of monks in the underground church,
The Tartars, the Cossacks, the Germans, the Stalinists, the contemporaries,
...

A fouled Sun rises from behind the textile mills
As I crawl out of my nightmares and hobble
To the sink. Then I luxuriate in the toilet
...

Reflect my grief
River of loss and gain
Mother of bliss
Source of pain
...

The Czar Peter opened up a window on Europe
From where the bankrupt poets of the future saw
A mysterious navy well-armed with battle-ready poetics
Advancing on Russia.
...

Prophets have light
Screwed tight in their eyes. They cannot see the darkness
Inside their own loincloth.
...

Like a painting by Velazquez
A woman stands
Alone in the frame
Touched by the brush of light
Blossoming.

How did
Flesh Tint reflect Naples Yellow
In this greenish blue room?

What made the sun
Suddenly rise on the palette?

That beggarwoman on Tulsi Pipe Road
That streetwalker in Chicago
What immortal light has washed them
To make her stand here
Naked
In mysterious clarity?

Venice, Barcelona, Madrid, Rome
Florence, Castile, Nice,
Pune, Satara, Valsad, Palanpur, Jaisalmer,
Thrissur, Kottayam,
Hissar, Ludhiana, Muzaffarpur, Bhuvaneshwar,
Ujjain, Jhansi, East Godavari, Karwar,
Vengurla, Alibag,
All geography is as colourless as linseed oil
Pigments come from the sky
Like a naked woman from over the Western Ghats
Luminous
...

They tell me your colour is blue
My life-breath feeds on your inspiring luminous pastures
All that stands still or moves has turned into grass
In celebration of your much-extolled blueness
...

In your poisoned wounds
Fall the shadows of burning planets
The splitting breakers of foaming oceans
...

as the butterfly
hovers near a sunset
its wings touch the sea
...

An early wake-up call
your first lover
...

Dilip Chitre Biography

Dilip Purushottam Chitre (Marathi: दिलीप पुरुषोत्तम चित्रे) was one of the foremost Indian writers and critics to emerge in the post Independence India. Apart from being a very important bilingual writer, writing in Marathi and English, he was also a painter and filmmaker. Biography He was born in Baroda on 17 September 1938. His father Purushottam Chitre used to publish a periodical named Abhiruchi which was highly treasured for its high, uncompromising quality. Dilip Chitre's family moved to Mumbai in 1951 and he published his first collection of poems in 1960. He was one of the earliest and the most important influences behind the famous "little magazine movement" of the sixties in Marathi. He started Shabda with Arun Kolatkar and Ramesh Samarth. In 1975, he was awarded a visiting fellowship by the International Writing Programme of the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa in the United States. He has also worked as a director of the Indian Poetry Library, archive, and translation centre at Bharat Bhavan, a multi arts foundation, Bhopal. He also convened a world poetry festival in New Delhi followed by an international symposium of poets in Bhopal. Works on Poetry His Ekun Kavita or Collected Poems were published in the nineteen nineties in three volumes. As Is,Where Is selected English poems (1964-2007) and "Shesha" English translation of selected Marathi poems both published by Poetrywala are among his last books published in 2007. He has also edited An Anthology of Marathi Poetry (1945–1965). He is also an accomplished translator and has prolifically translated prose and poetry. His most famous translation is of the celebrated 17th century Marathi bhakti poet Tukaram (published as Says Tuka). He has also translated Anubhavamrut by the twelfth century bhakti poet Dnyaneshwar. Film Career He started his professional film career in 1969 and has since made one feature film, about a dozen documentary films, several short films in the cinema format, and about twenty video documentary features. He wrote the scripts of most of his films as well as directed or co-directed them. He also scored the music for some of them. Awards and Honors He worked as an honorary editor of the quarterly New Quest, a journal of participative inquiry, Mumbai. Among Chitre’s honours and awards are several Maharashtra State Awards, the Prix Special du Jury for his film Godam at the Festival des Trois Continents at Nantes in France in 1984, the Ministry of Human Resource Development’s Emeritua Fellowship, the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program Fellowship, the Indira Gandhi Fellowship, the Villa Waldberta Fellowship for residence given by the city of Munich, Bavaria, Germany and so forth. He was D.A.A.D. ( German Academic Exchange) Fellow and Writer-in-Residence at the Universities of Heidelberg and Bamberg in Germany in 1991–92. He was Director of Vagarth, Bharat Bhavan Bhopal and the convenor-director of Valmiki World Poetry Festival ( New Delhi,1985) and International Symposium of Poets ( Bhopal, 1985), a Keynote Speaker at the World Poetry Congress in Maebashi, Japan (1996) and at the Ninth International Conference on Maharashtra at Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA in 2001 and Member of the International Jury at the recent Literature festival Berlin, 2001. He was member of a three-writer delegation ( along with Nirmal Verma and U. R. Ananthamurthy) to the Soviet Union (Russia, Ukraine, and Georgia), Hungary, the Federal Republic of Germany and France in the spring and summer of 1980 and to the Frankfurter Buchmesse in Frankfurt, Germany in 1986; he has given readings, lectures, talks, participated in seminars and symposia, and conducted workshops in creative writing and literary translation in Iowa City, Chicago, Tempe, Paris, London, Weimar, Saint Petersburg, Berlin, Frankfurt, Konstanz, Heidelberg, Bamberg, Tübingen, Northfield, Saint-Paul/Minneapolis, New Delhi, Bhopal, Mumbai, Kochi, Vadodara, Kolhapur, Aurangabad, Pune, Maebashi, and Dhule among other places. He travelled widely in Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America as well as in the interiors of India; been on the visiting faculty of many universities and institutions, a consultant to projects. He was the Honorary President of the Sonthhheimer Cultural Association, of which he was also a Founder-Trustee. Death After a long bout with cancer, Dilip Chitre died at his residence in Pune on 10 December 2009.)

The Best Poem Of Dilip Chitre

Father Returning Home

My father travels on the late evening train
Standing among silent commuters in the yellow light
Suburbs slide past his unseeing eyes
His shirt and pants are soggy and his black raincoat
Stained with mud and his bag stuffed with books
Is falling apart. His eyes dimmed by age
fade homeward through the humid monsoon night.
Now I can see him getting off the train
Like a word dropped from a long sentence.
He hurries across the length of the grey platform,
Crosses the railway line, enters the lane,
His chappals are sticky with mud, but he hurries onward.
Home again, I see him drinking weak tea,
Eating a stale chapati, reading a book.
He goes into the toilet to contemplate
Man's estrangement from a man-made world.
Coming out he trembles at the sink,
The cold water running over his brown hands,
A few droplets cling to the greying hairs on his wrists.
His sullen children have often refused to share
Jokes and secrets with him. He will now go to sleep
Listening to the static on the radio, dreaming
Of his ancestors and grandchildren, thinking
Of nomads entering a subcontinent through a narrow pass.

Dilip Chitre Comments

Romella Kitchens 18 April 2014

I became acquainted with the work of Dilip Chitre through an issue of Poets&Writers Magazine which featured him a few years before his illness and death. Over the years, even in the Americas, his work can be found. That is proof of his global work with poetry and the high quality and impact of his very personal, real poetic narratives. His curriculae vitae is one of the longest, most impressive accountings of a poet's sojourns on the planet earth one can find. He traveled to many countries and implemented poetry as a diplomatic tool. He won many awards. In short, his (biography) or vitae shows what a powerhouse he was.

15 2 Reply
Ramesh Rai 17 October 2014

I just came across this great person. Desires to know more about.

11 3 Reply
Laxmi banjara 25 March 2018

Very good person .

8 1 Reply
DINESH MOURYA 16 March 2018

upload change poem by dilip chitre

6 2 Reply
Febin 01 September 2018

One of the foremost indian poet

1 1 Reply
mohini 31 October 2021

Kindly upload poem Being in turmoil from Tuka says

0 0 Reply
Sylvia Frances Chan 15 August 2021

Wishing your beloved great family CONGRATULATIONS with YOU being chosen as The Poet Of The Day, today Sunday 15 Aug on India's Indpendence Day, R.I.P. for the Great Indian Poet!

0 0 Reply
suman 19 November 2019

please upload the poem change

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Sakshi Sharma 28 August 2019

I want more quotes of DILIP CHITRE Please send me

1 0 Reply
Bijay Kant Dubey 19 October 2018

Dilip Chitre as a poet is but a multi-faceted genius, not only a poet, but a teacher, a documentary maker, a poetry centre director, a journalist and a globe-trotter too. Not only a Marathi poet, but one of English too. To say the things candidly is the specialty of Chitfre. His translation of Tukaram has added new feathers in his cap. Whatever be his tone, Chitre is of course poignant and devotional.

0 0 Reply

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