Thank God, I Could Not Be A Poet, Next I Shall Try My Best Poem by Bijay Kant Dubey

When Nissim Ezekiel had been the editor of the Indian P.E.N.,
He asked me to send my poems to other journals
Instead of publishing,
When Jayanta Mahapatra used to select poems for the Sunday magazine
Of the Telegraph,
He asked me to wait for more time,
But Adil Jussawalla published poems from my first book
In Debonair in 1989 April.

A few publishers agreed to publish my collections of poems
But a token money I too had to advance to
Which I did not,
Nor liked I to be in Delhi for approaching
And bringing out
And had I brought from, it would have benfitted me,
Freeing me from extra care,
Self-publishing and other related works.

Just my correspondences with their comments console me
In the times of my distress,
When I think of being relegated into oblivion
And of stopping poetry-writing,
The letters of Jayanta Mahapatra, Nissim Ezekiel, Dilip Chitre,
Keki N.Daruwalla, Khushwant Singh,
M.K.Naik, Prema Nandakumar, C.V.venugopal, S.Krishna Bhatt.