Nissim Ezekiel The Man And The Poet Poem by Bijay Kant Dubey

Nissim Ezekiel the man and the poet, the writer of
A Time To Change, Sixty Poems, The Third,
The Unfinished Man, The Exact Name,
Hymns In Darkness, Latter-Day Psalms,
An Indian Maharashtrian Jew
Writing poems in English.

A professor of English of Bombay University
And the editor of the Indian P.E.N.,
Nissim introduced modernism,
Went along new lines,
New thinking and temperament
While exploring new possibilities.

As a poet, he drew from the Elizabethan lyric writers
And sonneteers,
One can read and come to conclude it
While going through his love poems,
Sometimes drawing from Marvell, sometimes Donne,
Sometimes Wyatt, Drayton, Spenser and Shakespeare.

Poetry is the experience of love, I mean love experience,
Poetry is knowledge,
Poetry is humour and joke,
Poetry conversational English,
Indian pidgin-English,
I mean the grammarian's grammatical English,
Spoken not, written English.

Sometimes he sees off Miss Pushpa at the airport,
Sometimes he can seen visiting the cinema hall
With his beloved,
Sometimes chuckling to see the pregnant woman
Viewing the nudes in art gallery,
Sometimes with the birdwatcher and the lover
Waiting and watching for.

A hosteller, a hotelier, a tourist and a traveller,
He is a convent boy,
A modern man of a modern city,
Of the city landscape, the urban space,
Of Bombay the metropolitan town,
Observing India as an alien insider,
Modern life and culture.

India a bundle of contraries and contradictions,
Of poverty, superstition and backwardness,
Pavement dwellers and squalid conditions
And he apart from,
Presenting the things in a humourous way
Jocularly, fantastically
Smiling away the things of life,
Making us burst into a laughter.

Nissim is actually a modern-day poet ready to win over
With please, thank you, kindly,
Ta-ta, bye-bye, goodbye,
O.K., see you again,
One of birthday gifts, marriage parties, valedictions,
Good morning, good night.