Jayanta Mahapatra (1928-2023) Poem by Bijay Kant Dubey

The poet who had been yesterday
Is not today,
Has gone away,
The man as a traveller in him,
But the poet has remained
With the books.

Now the body has been cremated
As per his last wish,
The poet reminisced
Odisha and Oriya life-view
Going by the country and the urban space
One who tried to know realities and mysteries as well.

Imagery, word-play, stylistic expression
Had been the things of his,
Poetry came to him
Through his love of physics,
Light and darkness chapters
And his interest in photography.

The Jagannath temple,
The Konark,
The Khandagiri,
The Dhaulagiri,
The Asokan rock edicts, the river Daya
Drew him close to dabble in ink.

Indian hunger, poverty, scarcity of food,
Poor housing, underdevelopment, backwardness,
Illiteracy, superstition, fatalism,
Gender bias, patriarchal hegemony
He could not avert his gaze from
What it ailed society.