Obituary By A K Ramanujan Poem by Ramesh Iyengar
Obituary By A K Ramanujan
Father, when he passed on,
left dust
on a table of papers,
left debts and daughters,
a bedwetting grandson
named by the toss
of a coin after him,
a house that leaned
slowly through our growing
years on a bent coconut
tree in the yard.
Being the burning type,
he burned properly
at the cremation
as before, easily
and at both ends,
left his eye coins
in the ashes that didn't
look one bit different,
several spinal discs, rough,
some burned to coal, for sons
to pick gingerly
and throw as the priest
said, facing east
where three rivers met
near the railway station;
no longstanding headstone
with his full name and two dates
to holdin their parentheses
everything he didn't quite
manage to do himself,
like his caesarian birth
in a brahmin ghetto
and his death by heart-
failure in the fruit market.
But someone told me
he got two lines
in an inside column
of a Madras newspaper
sold by the kilo
exactly four weeks later
to streethawkers
who sell it in turn
to the small groceries
where I buy salt,
coriander,
and jaggery
in newspaper cones
that I usually read
for fun, and lately
in the hope of finding
these obituary lines.
And he left us
a changed mother
and more than
one annual ritual.
I am surprised by the number of comments on this poem, I remember - wrote in 2019 my comments now seems disappeared, was it due to Covid? ? ? well, the continuity is something...one cannot overlook in human race. Family to family and generation to generations.
Part 3.. Malayalam Poet of yesteryears wrote, "thaathan marannaal thanayan thudarnnu/ Thad vruththakhandam paripurnamaakkum..". Works left incomplete by father are completed by his son with zeal, is the meaning.
People leave the world leaving many of their duties and wishes incomplete. It is for the next generation to complete them.
In today's society, transferring the torch from one generation to the next is a pipe dream; you won't find sons following in the footsteps of their dads or forefathers; everyone wants their own identity, and allegations of nepotism have become all too common..
A very forthright account of ‘life after death'. People, well, many of them, leave this world,
This poem has not been translated into any other language yet.
I would like to translate this poem
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4/22/2024 10:36:13 PM # 1.0.0.1119
What a poem this is! It has nothing of a poem. It bears no poetic zeal. It's much shocking and disgusting that today we have killed our poetic zeal and sensibility. We appreciate even a bundle of words. This type of so-called poems are not worth following. We should come out of these dead bundle of words. Shame to the universities that prescribe this type of so-called poems in their syllabus. Shame to the publishers that publish this type of triflities.
Why don't you try and write a poem with poetic zeal, you would surely be appreciated more than Ramanujan.
Sir,
Can I ask you to elaborate on your views?