Past Perfect And Present Indefinite Poem by Bipin Patsani

The art of living, sharing, caring for all
And working together for a common goal
Is the greatest art mankind must learn,
If at all for its misdeeds it cares to mourn.

Love for freedom, national pride,
Sense of loss in an ancient war,
The burden of the past and tradition,
And the animation of the sublime on stones
May help produce the space-shuttle poetry
Of some private pleasure, five-star agony
Or even in building up some info-tech story.

Awards and honours mean much for the elite;
But the lifestyle of the common people,
The pain and strain they endure
Is a nation's true identity.

Why is it that we have plenty of people
Who have passions for poetry and politics,
But none to show us some definite direction?

When achievements reduce to be personal,
Failure remains to be the collective responsibility
Of a people for sheer debate that ends verbal.

One wonders at those unknown soldiers
Who had given us a taste of victory
In their fight to death, eternally present
As undying resistance to force,
For history to remember,
Instrumental in its way to peace.

Though age makes us weary,
Makes us sad, self-centered and lonely,
The lines of Gopabandhu,
Who wept for the poor, worked for them
And wrote for them, still haunt our memory.

'Not in years, months,
Not in days, nor hours of pleasure;
Man lives in his work,
And the work, his only measure.'


II

While the coastal belt bears nature's brunt
Having to experience cyclones and flood,
The anguished west has a hungry earth to tread.

Our ambitious appetite
For name, fame and creativity
Helps in no way to end poverty.

In this land of temples and gods
People are, as it were, too great and godly
To think of the wretched of the earth,
Who, in their opinion, are destined to die
Starvation deaths or eating mango kernel,
Cursed to make only babies to rock.

They seduced and stole their god,
They stole all their woods
And the little they had for food.
The dignity of living as humans they denied them,
For which a mother now sells even her child
Compelled to pay so great a price for a handful of rice.

In our incompatible feudal minds, aids,
How much big, doesn't add up to our needs
As it all disappears in the black hole
Of our recklessness and greed.

Our big-brother-show of promise
Like the rock edict mockery of peace
Ebbs with the dark waters of dying waves.

III

It is not for our lack of courage
Or skill that we suffer.
We too had our greener days.
The malady is elsewhere.

When strength becomes weakness,
The burden of achievement
Turns out to be the cause of misery.

Others built a sound sustenance
And left their pride to God;
We made God our face
And installed pride in the head instead.

Idle worshippers of cult figures
And alien to commitment and work culture,
Most of us love to depend on others.
Money comes and goes
And we get used to our woes
Spending the little we have or get in pleasing
Gods and godheads much in a community feast.
The larger part of a loan
Which otherwise could have assuaged
The suffering, is found finished and gone
In celebration of some sorrow or a little gain
To please all gods in the neighborhood.


IV

The big and beautiful adorns the Odissi sky
With religious fervor even in sensual joy.
So, there is this dumb dereliction,
This deletion of the basic needs
Which shy away in the dominant presence
Of the big black God of total absence.

The Radha Krishna myth takes new dimensions,
New depths in its passionate presentation.
The miserable, rejoicing their transformation
In the night, strip to their hells at dawn.

The primeval theme of love, sex, war,
Possession and pride gives us a good ride.

The thought of a lost war and the struggle
Compensates the loss and abuse.
It contemplates the sluggishness
If it doesn't exhaust means by much use
Like a militant outfit, left with little to offer the people
It makes suffer, wasting more on weapons and the hit.
Pillars only don't ensure peace
If the ground beneath is hollow,
Where each and every one growls
For a bigger share of the kill.

If past perfect is our treasure,
Can't our present be progressive
And food for all be our pleasure?


V

When caste ridden power politics
Aim at establishing superiority,
The concept of a welfare state
And democracy doesn't work.

Since the deprived,
Most often victims of false prestige,
Feel contented with a gift of lies
And stick to image worship
In their love for noble lineage
Which, they think, can deliver the good,
A humble origin doesn't fit into
The scheme of the things to begin with.

Thus we sit and wait
In the deluxe suite of our insight
Looking for some poetic truth
And invest on our intellectual exercise,
Aching for some new surprise, new image,
Good enough to please, conceal and confuse.


VI

The desperate dreams
And defiance of a simple folk
That has always loved
To have a life of its own
Free from subjugation,
The beautiful landscape,
The golden beach
And the mystic silence
Of the poetic network
Of magnificent temples
Come to my mind and I smile
When they ask me,
'How do your people write
So good poetry? '

But when I am asked
About starvation deaths
At my place
Or a mother selling her child
For a handful of rice
Even after fifty-four years
Of Independence,
I feel miserable myself
Groping for words.