Jayanta Mahapatra Poems

Not yet.
Under the mango tree
The cold ash of a deserted fire.
...

In the darkened room
a woman
cannot find her reflection in the mirror
...

The faint starlight rolls restlessly on the mat.
Those women talking outside have clouds passing across their eyes.
Always there is a moon that is taking me somewhere.
Why does one room invariably lead into other room?
...

Afterwards when the wars of Kalinga were over,
the fallow fields of Dhauli
hid the blood-spilt butchered bodies. [originally 'red-smeared voiceless bodies']
...

It was hard to believe the flesh was heavy on my back.
The fisherman said: Will you have her, carelessly,
trailing his nets and his nerves, as though his words
sanctified the purpose with which he faced himself.
I saw his white bone thrash his eyes.

I followed him across the sprawling sands,
my mind thumping in the flesh's sling.
Hope lay perhaps in burning the house I lived in.
Silence gripped my sleeves; his body clawed at the froth
his old nets had only dragged up from the seas.

In the flickering dark his hut opened like a wound.
The wind was I, and the days and nights before.
Palm fronds scratched my skin. Inside the shack
an oil lamp splayed the hours bunched to those walls.
Over and over the sticky soot crossed the space of my mind.

I heard him say: My daughter, she's just turned fifteen…
Feel her. I'll be back soon, your bus leaves at nine.
The sky fell on me, and a father's exhausted wile.
Long and lean, her years were cold as rubber.
She opened her wormy legs wide. I felt the hunger there,
the other one, the fish slithering, turning inside.
...

Awaken them; they are knobs of sound
that seem to melt and crumple up
like some jellyfish of tropical seas,
...

At Puri, the crows.
...

The long, dying silence of the rain
over the hills
opens one's touch,
...

Of that love, of that mile
walked together in the rain,
only a weariness remains.
...

The strong south wind hits our faces again,
it's October;
sunsets are fiery red
and the waters of wells are clear already-
...