What Is Poetry, Who To Say It To Me? Poem by Bijay Kant Dubey

What is poetry? Who to say it to me?
In order to know the meaning of it, I turn over the pages of dictionaries
To find out, what it is called poetry,
Who a poet,
How the contents of it?
Poetry poetry,
The rhythm of speech, the rhythm of life.

Poetry is poetry,
What you take it for, what take I for,
Words musical and pictorial, spontaneous and natural,
Full of intonation and sound effects,
Sonorous and melodious
As the cuckoo sings,
The brook sings by.

Poetry is poetry,
What you take it for, what take I for,
Poetry poetry,
The poetry of life,
Poetry coming out from life
And this existence of ours
And if there is life, there will be poetry
And if there is no life, there will be no poetry.

Poetry is the song of heart which it comes out
When in joy or when in sadness,
The heart wants to sing and share the load,
Poetry is a feeling of heart,
Felt in the heart,
Taken for consolation.

Poetry is words arranged, re-arranged,
Deleted or stylistically presented,
Musical or unmusical,
Sung or unsung.

Poetry is an album of pictures and photographs,
Poetry as the paintings of life,
Poetry scenic and picturesque,
Poetry landscapic
With fields and fallows,
Wilds impregnable,
Hilly, forested and craggy.

Poetry is poems pieced together with,
Grouped with,
A sample of the writer,
A general term, under the caption of,
But the poem is a single piece,
An individual presentation.

So, in a poem, there will be
Feelings and emotions, images and ideas,
Thoughts and reflections,
Facts and fictions,
Dramas, novels, short stories too can be
In verse.

As for a romanticist, poetry is naturalistic,
Scenic, landscapic,
Imagistic and lyrical,
Photographic,
Sentimental, sonorous,
Sensitive, sentimental and sensuous.

As for a classicist, poetry is classical,
Sober, serious, grand and moralistic,
Theological, spiritual, philosophical,
Restoring.

As for a realist, poetry is real and factual,
Down to realities,
This earth full of troubles and tribulations
And poetry showing struggles and sufferings
Of common man.

As for a linguist, poetry is but a linguistic exercise
In word-play, sentence-structure,
Verbose, weighty and jarring,
Broken and hollow,
Searching for meaning and value,
Written by the townsmen and urban people,
Shallow and hollow from their within.

Poetry poetry not, the diction of it,
A linguistic exercise or expertise,
In the use of vocabulary,
Bombastic, verbose, broken, dull and drab,
Artificial, ornamental, pedantic or modernistic.

To some poetry is satire, irony and humour,
Fun, pun and comicality and joke,
Caricature,
Malicious and full of jibes and jostles,
Throwing rotten eggs and tomatoes in satire
And it pinching the man satirized, cut jokes upon,
But the light verses taking lightly
And the irony twisting,
Saying in a two-folded way.

A serious man will take poetry seriously
But a light man lightly,
It varies from man to man
And his taste to taste,
A poem can be tragic and so much pathetic,
A poem can be comic,
Based on the as you like it theme.

Poems poems, poems many,
A poem a picture, a photograph,
A sketch, a drawing,
An oil painting,
A song, a drama,
A dance, a love-affair.

A poem a portrait, an image, a reflection,
A thought, an idea, a dream,
A view, a wish, a desire,
Fulfilled or unfulfilled,
In good spirits or bad spirits.

A poor and beggarly but beautiful girl,
A child innocent and ignorant,
The poor maid asking for a cup of tea,
A wild flower strangely beautiful,
May be the ideas, images and reflections.

Poetry a cluster of poems,
Samples, telling of the writer and his style and presentation,
His style, diction, manner, approach, rhyme and rhythm,
Rhetoric and prosody.

Poetry is a general term
And is inclusive of all,
What it is within its campus,
Range and purview.

And the writer of that type and tenor of poetry
A poet,
Lyrical, natural or artistic
Pictorial, photographic or scenic,
Modern, modernistic or post-modern,
Linguistic, imagistic or symbolical,
Metaphysical, mythical or mystical,
Satiric, humorous or light,
Realistic, impressionistic or cathartic,
Experimental, exploratory or conventional,
Thematic, stylistic, manneristic or rhythmic.

The types of poets
And the types of their poetry,
Poetry in types and tenors of expression,
What I follow, that is not yours,
What yours, that is not mine,
But still are we one.

A poet communistic, believing in radical ideology,
A poet non-communistic,
A poet historical
While the other sociological or economic,
If the one realistic, another dreamy and loveful,
If one psychological another dramatic.


Poetry as emotions and feelings, images and pictures,
Dreams and wishes,
Felt, dreamt, seen, experienced and gathered
As life seen from a far-off,
The night so mythical and mystical,
Dark, deep and opaque
And the narratives of our existence shrouded in mystery.

Poetry as folklore,
The folklore of humanity
In which you can hear the folk songs being sung,
Folk danced being danced,
Folk paintings displayed far,
Far from here
Into the countryside
Where do lie in the hamlets and thorps
Of racial, ethnic and archetypal man.

The myths of life, of light,
Light and darkness,
The world and the creation,
Who to unravel them to me,
Which but want I to know them,
The night of darkness,
Of the creational darkness?

The poet a communist
Believing in radical ideology and thinking
And block thinking,
I cannot believe it,
As literature never ismic,
It is of man written by man,
A common man writing about common man,
Dividing not between man and man,
You rich and he poor,
Why is he rich, why he poor,
He is rich as for them and he is poor as for them,
Oh, the blame game and nasty politics!

A poet a communist,
A leftist leftistic, going to the left,
Living in the Red House,
Dreaming red,
Eating red and reading red leaflets and pamphlets,
I cannot, cannot believe that,
In proletarian dictatorship and anarchy.


No talk to do but Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism and Maoism,
Without understanding them,
What do they say to,
What the base of theirs, their thinking and ideology;
Just the hammers, sickles, broomsticks, shoes, bamboo baskets,
Axes, spades, sticks and other tools into their hands
And they threatening,
Giving slogans against the capitalists,
With red flags, festoons and banners,
Demonstrating, protesting and bringing out rallies.

A poet communistic, leftistic
Promoting and propagating and practicing it
I cannot believe it,
Distributing pamphlets of communistic literature,
I cannot.
Radical ideology and radical thinking
Is not my avocation?
As no communist am I,
No leftist,
As believe I in no violence,
As can crush no opponent of mine,
But I too a poet of the common man,
The unknown citizen,
The elation of human labour,
As am more communistic than these petty bourgeois leaders,
Who misguide them just.

In the language of the guns,
The rhetoric of the tougher tongue, believe I not,
Tone it down, please,
My rhetoric is one of, do your work,
Do not discriminate,
As like I no politicking,
As no politico am I.

O, what was I saying,
I deviated and digressed from!
Poetry biographical or autobiographical,
A poem a portrait of Lenin,
Stalin or Brezhnev,
A poem a portrait of Gandhi!

Political violence and radical ideology,
Believe I not in,
Why to hatch plots, heckle and harass,
Indiscriminate in?

A poem a picture of the wilds,
The hills sunny and bluish,
The marshlands dotted with
White small cows, white lilies and white storks,
The hanuman jumping with the kid,
The red-mouthed monkey snatching the lotus
From the hands of the devotee
On way to temple.

A battle fought and lost long ago,
A war memorial and a cenotaph,
Aircrafts lying abandoned and dumped of the Second World War,
Can also be the topics of poetry.