Keki Nasserwanji Daruwalla As I Have Known Him Poem by Bijay Kant Dubey

Poetry is dramatic monologues where the speaker
Thinking within,
The crisis and the conflict of mind,
Poetry is bombastic words
Curtailed and half-said,
Poetry is tragedy
And its terminology

And the poet a tragedian, Aristotlean and Senecan,
Jacobean and Shakespearean not,
But an Indian deriving
From a study of them
And their theories and concepts
Applied to dramatization in poetry

With a cross-bow, the mariner shoots the albatross,
The sign of god hope,
Bears the consequence
And repents for a penance
And the sin gets washed off,
But there is nothing like that

Valmiki feels imaginatively the pain
Of the kronch bird,
After its mate was killed
By the heartless tribal falconer,
But the description is not like this
In Daruwalla

Maybe it better to place the example of King Sivi
With a wounded pigeon
Fallen into the court of his
And the falconer claiming for,
But the great kind-hearted king giving the test,
The description is not even this

Daruwalla is a poet of some hard heart,
Cruel and callous,
Tears not into the eyes of his,
Just like the baron of My Last Duchess of Browning,
Just like Ted Hughes of Hawk Roosting
And the hawk his persona

Poetry is purgatory, poetry is cathartic,
Just like the drama it cleanses
Through the guilt of sin and expiation,
Feel the horror and terror of life
And the tragedy of living,
Go through the literary terms
To understand the poetry of life

In one book after, Under Orion, Apparition in April,
Crossing of Rivers, Winter Poems,
The Keeper of the Dead, Landscapes
He goes on writing in his own way,
Quite distinct from others,
The poetry of disease, death and doom
Seen through
Famine, catastrophe, drought and epidemic

The floods swirling and engulfing a vast tract of land,
Just like the brewed coffee,
The areas appearing as islands
And the break of epidemics,
The cholera patients taken to distant hospitals
On palanquins or cots

As a tragedian, he takes poems as to be his tragic pieces,
Containing the tidbits of tragedy,
Thinking of human life in terms of
And defining so as the blood clots going off
And the barrel speaking the words

Though rooted into the rural soil,
He is a poet not of
God made the country, man made the town,
But of the riot-torn, curfew-clamped scenery
And the landscape

Nor is there anything to derive from Indian
Thought, culture and tradition,
Philosophy, metaphysics and spirituality
Rather than society and its sarcasm,
Sordid and sardonic