Glimpses From Life Poem by Bijay Kant Dubey

I thinking about my mother
A poetic sketch,
Seeing the older albums,
The old house where I used to live,
The river ghat
Where I had burnt my father,
The lonely backyard of my house
Where I burnt my mother.

The older things bring out
Reminiscences and memories,
Refreshing them
With a mere sighting of these,
Older faces and acquaintances,
Older houses and places of meetings.

Older books and Ph.D. theses older
Can also bring about
Memories and reminiscences,
Of readers, writers with autographs,
Printing styles,
Pages old and yellow, pale and smudged.

Once upon a time
The readers used to pencil the lines
With blue and red wooden pencils,
But now pencil they not.

Once my father got pants and the shirt stitched and sewn
As for going to England,
But could not go to due to the Chinese aggression
And those are still there,
But he is not;
My mother is not,
But her saris are there in the tin trunk.

While living in a cottage, the moonlight to fall from,
Stars shining in the skies,
Twinkling far,
I used to see sleeping,
Under the cold nights
In mist and fog
I experiencing life
Under the straw-thatched, bamboo-pillared
From the sides, at four points to support the thatch
And I used to red there in the animal farm.

During the cold winter, while sleeping in the cottage poorly,
I used to some straw on the wooden cot
Behind the bed sheet to warm up;
Sometimes with the earthen bowl with ashes and fire coal embers
Beneath our jute-rope strung, woven cot
And I sleeping on the verandah, open,
Just shaded over.

During the spring, the mahua blooms used to fall from
And the black, black pigs used to take on, pick up
And used to quarrel for food,
The foxes too used to be there
But these trees rarer now-a-days.

The dance of the cobras have I seen,
Dancing and dancing all alone
Like some villain, monster,
Demon or devil,
Blackly, yellowish and whitish,
Their hiss and hood,
What to say about?

In the straw thatches, the white cobras generally live in
Or in the ant-hills
Or beds older and places abandoned,
The deadly blackly kraits of the hilly areas,
Bushes and forests,
Shiny ad striped,
Darting the red tongue out.

When the simul trees used to be in bloom, the vultures used to sit on,
Come down and play in the bushes
And after that, they used to vanish away,
Where, I could not know this?
The vultures big-big and bulgy
Sitting on the branches of the naked simul trees
But with red-red big scentless blossoms.

The naked-naked palash trees,
Standing leafless and small,
Without the leaves
But full of,
With the clusters of reddish blossoms,
Just like the red gulmohurs,
But wild and leafless and beautiful
Even atop the hills, but none to appreciate wild ravishingly beauty.