Jayanta Mahapatra In His Door Of Paper Poem by Bijay Kant Dubey

Jayanta Mahapatra’s Door of Paper is what his verse cannot be,
So lucid like The Discovery of India,
Like Mulk Raj Anand’s Story of India for children,
He handles the things
Poetry, art and craft so lyrically,
Life, literature, time and reflection.

Sitting by the door, the poet reflects upon
In his prose-pieces, literary essays, reviews and reflections,
Opinions, annotations and notes,
What is poetry,
Quoting his own poems and relating to
Which the critics have failed to allude to and refer back.

The smaller door poems have an entity of their own,
They may be the small doors of the rock-built temples
Through which the devotees go slipping
One temple to another,
Maybe they the doors
From where one thinks about life and its times deeply.

Keeping the head on the hands and sitting thereon,
Waiting for the expected coming
Or that coming to naught,
The poet goes on dreaming about
After being lost into the visions and dreams of his,
The visionary glides and flights of own.

In his sketches and anecdotes, he tells about his life
As Charles Lamb about his childhood and others,
The poet tries to keep the track of poesy
Embarking upon the space and canvas of his poetry,
The relationship between stones and verse-lines,
Changing wheels of life’s times and the affirmation of poetic words.

Rains and rituals not merely, but the yoga-yoginis,
The tantrica traditions,
The relationship between poetry and physics,
The aesthetic sense, the didactic purpose
And his acceptance of poems and rejection slips as well,
Taking to a personal plane of delving.