For the train of poetry
A Collection of self composed poems by Arup Ratan Ghosh
Please send your comments and suggestions to
arghosh@satyam.net.in or arghosh@rediffmail.com
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Contents
A pencil sketch (New Entry)
Floating in the water-pond of chest (New Entry)
She is sleeping (New Entry)
The Siren of Heaven (New Entry)
The girls procession after the lathicharge (New Entry)
The septic publicity in the chest
The world is drowning in the well of emptiness
Rabindranath in the underground
Stopping in the Rain - Suddenly
If the yet-to-come-moments of mine
Are hurled in the sleepy indifferent river
Then why again the tales from the shore come in mind ?
Is someone standing there?
In the shore as if in a painting–
But all are drawn in pencil sketch.
Believe, no colour is there!
In the empty frame all are etched in pencil shade
––hanging from the sky, quivering
In the air
Isn't her orna–- hovering.
The window's transitory illusion is in the air.
Illustration by Supradip Sarkar
Floating in the water-pond of chest
The sleep breaks out like a piece of glass
You are standing close by
The dream shifts its sequence
Is it not true what the young boy has just seen?
A dreamy misty flower
The wind is its pain and suffering
The memory is like a lonely swan
Out of the group
Floating only on the water-pond of chest
Irrespective of the fleeting
Dreams and nights and years.
She is sleeping
But the rivers, forests-- the whole nature are awake.
Mountains are sleeping but not like her
At any moment they may wake up.
The mountains spreading almost all through the head of India are in the Himalyan range identified as dormant volcanoes.
The forests, jungles and bushes adjacent to them are also awake
In their own dense mystic world.
But everything appreas as sleeping in the prolong spell of her Sleeping through out the modern age.
In this last night she is sleeping
As was sleeping one certain lady and her sons in the about-to-be- fired-house calling jatugriha 1 in the Mahabharata.
All through this black concluding night in every spell of centuries
The night watchman shouts out very loudly
But in her business as usual mode she cntinues sleeping
Only the name of her state changes time to time
Down from Radbanga, Goud, Sube Bangla, East and West Bengal to Bagladesh and just Bangla 2
Her uninterrupted sleep let us dream
And let us walk in sleep
In the schools, colleges and in universities
Even in the sectors of peace keeping and border security
In everywhere sleepwalk and work in peculiar sleep
Pushing the heap of life ahead in an inexplicable somnambulism
Crossing over the millennia in a great ignorance.
In the closed room you are totally naked
And the dressing table is keeping up the mirror as if since from its birth
You are drawing the yellow sari from the wooden hanger
Along with your left profile your body flows in the mirror
You are bending your knee - the mirror reflects straight
Forgetting everything you are submerged in nudity
Even have forgotten your nudity
You are very much alone and tender -like the yellow sari
No one is present in this graful ardent room
The blue walls are in your four sides.
What will you do in such a not-sexual absentmindedness?
With what you 'll cover your breast?
If the deep devoted mirror herself touching her tongue in the mouth cavity speakes out-'bathing!'
Just think of the situation!
No one is in this room - no where
And you are alone in this bluish nakedness
The pleasent notes of sitar resonate
Bathing! Only bathing! and bathing!
In the deep night no one speakes out with anyone
The Guava trees, the ancestral house, some fallen leaves
All through the night the sleepless cobult blue eyes of the sky,
And overspread moonlight and a kind of strange sadness calls ceaselessly
The girls procession after the lathicharge1
Through Lenin Srani2 Calcutta the girls who are being lathicharged by the police are returning with their bold steps
Until then the artistic spirit of courage and protest of the stable bronze figure of Matangini3 Hazra near Shahid Minar4 protect them
These college girls about 20 years totally trampling their graceful tenderness
Made a unique procession in colourful roit of salowar kamij5, kurta6, blood, death and revolution.
Being panickstricken the home-returning- passers by who stopped for sometime due to the sudden lathicharge by the police are looking at their courageous figures and are thinking:
How these have become such?--
How these girls have become such:
leaving the social trap of Santoshi Maa7, marriage-centric life, youth, children,film stars, video and beauti parlour, fashion and TV serial in which path they are going, in the ruin of three hundred years' Calcutta ?
Which school has shaped them so modern?
The common people in their quick home-returning steps who do Not like to be in any trouble spot or anything unconventional_ probably felt a little ashamed
Because the gilrs have come for them, in fact for everyone.
They have come to make a protest against the bus fare rise and For the other injustices.
Many of them are still lying blooded in Esplanade, or in police vans or in a few hospital going - taxies...
What actually can be said to them?
Each of them is indeed someone's friend, sister or lover.
Again the police force is seemed to come after them with Beatons and protectors in hand fire arms in the belt
And with heavy bootsteps
The sound we always have heard time to again
In Manipur8, in the 70's9,
In Sarbourn10 or in Barangar11 or in Ten un Mein square
And from Ten un Mein to today's Wellington square12
The 17 August13 when the sun has already set
And it is becomoing dark in the evening
And out of home
In such an untimely period
Young girls are advancing boldly taking the flags in their shoulders
Sometimes it semed like an en mass flow of colourful flower prtals
Notes and references:
It doesn't rain for many years
Pouring with a heavy shower
Misty-to the eyes
Or descending inside the chest
Only the water falls with mal-harmonic sound.
It never rains at all!
(As it was long ago)
Like the soft sound of love,
No it doesn't-
Now the Rain
Just falls
As if it has to fall or drop only.
Sometimes a word comes alone
And sits in the minds' platform in silence
Time to time a few letters comes to it forming a group or a kind of tie
Having some meaning or without- meaning
They all wait sitting in the platform of the broken mind
For coming of the train of poetry.
He has a bubbling story repressed deeply within him
And there was adequate raining also
For dissolving in the bluish rain
Feeling no sensation he turns his face
As the fancy story of bluish rain are dead in the conventionality
Still a line at least remains
In the unknown breeze blowing silently.
The septic publicity in the chest
Engraving letters with a blade in the chest
I have written a poem just for you
But Oh! How many years have passed away
You haven't find time to read on even for once
The wounds are now pussy, septic and look awfully greenish.
There laid a cotton mat within my chest
With pleasures of uncertain decadence
And a river is flowing in your world
Through the darkness and meaninglessness all through the life
My body digs the sky in the deep concentrated night
And something falls tenderly with the heaved sighs
Keeping hand in the unfathomable depth
I remember
There was a railing of mine for love
And for being broken with the touchy cantilever
Whose darkness prevails now
Where the contemporary or the eternal calendar
Is waving being torn
Meaninglessly.
The world is drowning in the well of emptiness
Something is getting down always
What's that? though the stars twinkle as usual
The cross of Jesus in the wall
And the sky outside
Nothing actually is in between
Even this thought comes in mind with a murmuring sound
And staring at someone
To whom?
Is it someone to whom the glass on the table is staring at?
This forest is mental
And somehow I have entered here
And it is clearly felt and seen
That this forest has no air not a single leaf anywhere
Only the deep roots are there without the bodies of trees
Grasses are wiped out
The soilless world is getting down in retardation
In the depth of the void-well
Continuously
Girls don't dress so titillating. It's a college
Shit! Don't sit so close it's Calcutta University
Oh Sir don't come in your pyjama-Punjabi it's Calcutta Club
"Don't come to meet me with that deaf, dumb and raped girl
As three's no prior appointment"-said Joyti Basu, the Chief Minister of West Bengal two years ago.
"Don't come"-murmured Sharad Power to convey it to the thousands of advancing tribal mob through the lathi-charging polices at Nagpur on 23 November causing hundreds of deaths and injury due to a panicky stamped.
"Don't move"-says the photographer to the smiling unemployed youth who wants a p.p. size photograph by next day for the application.
"Don't burn my body"-preaches Balak Bramhachary in the
Dreams of gentle ladies-'I'll back in my resurrection'
Hold your breath, don't move anymore-says the X-ray operator to the patient waiting for a chest X-ray.
Oh lord don't beat me -don't break my camera
Cried the journalist on Maidan at the day of Mahakaran Abhijan ( and Sahid Dibas ) while
Seven people were gunned down by the police.
Don't sleep without a mosquito curtain
And there are so many do nots in the air
As Bill Clinton stop the war
Stick no bill
Amnesty don't come in India
Commit no nuisance
No smoking
Taslima don't write anything against religion-
Don't pluck flowers in the garden
And Hey fishermen -don't go to the deep sea tomorrow as there may be a cyclone.
No more movement miss - says the artist to his nude model
He whispers ' It's the time for "The Birth of Venus" again.
Rabindranath in the underground
It was not the headline of any old newspaper Oh! readers, let me draw your attention
Though it is not a thesis on popular culture
It is a living experience of the metro-goers in Calcutta
Around 11 O'clock in the morning Rabindranath has to be connected with the magmatic flow of school/ college girls
Or girls in the escalator or in the bifurcating directions of the metro station towards Gokhale, Srishikshayatan etc.
Around 4 O' clock in the afternoon the atmosphere becomes almost the same
Only the office-hours - shrinkening -- fatigued passengers have to face a push and thrust out of the jeans and skirts holding the tender bodies and enthu of the youngsters.
No the girls are not the only `signifieds' of the (black and white copies of) Tagore's paintings, handwritten manuscripts, the doodlings which are arrayed in the underground panels of the station calling Rabindra Sadan.
These works of the poet's older age -- the women, darkness and the unconventional beauty of the paintings unlike his well-lit pieces of literature signify the poet's desire for ... an admirer thwarts his mind not to think of the rest of the comment what Buddhadeb Bose has once put.
The creative doodlings out of the corrections
While writing something reveal us various aspects of the poet -- we have heard of it a long ago.
But the imitations of imitations go from picture postcards to the metallic panels -- and with all Rabindra Sadan station
Signifies nothing of these.
No passengers think of Rabindranath when they
Come in or pass through the station
Not even the girls who use the station daily
The metro authority has turned Rabindranath into something stand-still, a cliché, or a false-nostalgia
The passengers cook up in their own `logics' with the glimpses of Rabindra Sadan through the window panes of the metro coaches.
Oh! It is Rabindra Sadan! Then it is not Maidan or Bhabanipur.
It is not even Esplanade either.
It is Rabindra Sadan only! Shut the eyes!
Let's have a sleep. Shyambazar is too far.
It is Rabindra Sadan!
Oh! I had to drop in a station before crossing the zone I have to pay the fine
Oh la la ! It is Rabindra Sadan
I am going just to the opposite direction
I've to be alert in my way
In a panel there is a poem where Rabindranath wrote about "path" in general
But to a few northwards passengers today this station gives the last chance of sitting
And to the pick-hours-morning passengers to the opposite direction
A feeling of relief of the heavy crowd in the coaches hover in as the train vomits a lot at Rabindra Sadan.
Today Rabindranath has become just a momentary zone of sense in the dark tunnel.
Hurry up! Some one is trying to commit suicide in the station. Cut the power
Oh! It's terribly dark in the tunnel.
Ink-pen has been disappeared from the market
and a few are shocked for that
Teaching has been disappeared from the universities and colleges
and a few Vice-chancellors, principals or professors are shocked for that.
Morality has been disappeared from the intellectuals
and there are a few among us who have really any feeling for them.
Many things are disappearing daily
Still almost no one has any feeling for those
As the manhole covers in the streets and
Politeness from behaviour
The dying poor street-peoples and
saris from mademoiselles
Idealism from religious institutions like..... and
Money from pocket
Colours from all kinds of flags and
Merit from high marks
Love out of sex and
Humanity from the Man
Life from civilisation
Grammar from sentences
Philanthropy from administration and
Social service from the doctors
Trees from the forests and
Tears from the cheeks
And innocent smiles in general
Courtesy from manners and
Medicines from the hospitals
Work-culture from the offices and
Pure air from atmosphere
Honesty from the best policies and
Sense from sensation
Duties from the rights and
Poetry from life
Heart from the neo-barbers
And space from time
Reality from virtuality
And the worlds from the world
Still there are something to be felt under the sky,
And the most of us feel charged
on the salary-day (for the salaried employees only)
on the day of bandh as a day of closure
and watching a soft-porn movie in TV or ...
from the wiles of a girl and
getting in touch with a miracle-man
from astrologers' predictions
getting a good news
and having a stroke of luck
and strangely enough to get charged
Sometimes even from something out of this
Awful void and meaninglessness
Caution: There is an overwhelming sense of unfeeling
in the guise of feelings.
Suddenly I've found the door
Opening which nothing can be seen in anyway
But has closed in front of me
Almost gaping a beautiful girl and an oversmart boy entered there
From then on the door remains closed
Being helpless I'm looking just from outside
Can't understand what they are doing in the closed-door room
How their invisible domain has been building up?
Is it something like the scenes shown normally in the good movies?
Whether the lucrative ups and downs of life will be shown a little bit after covering the whole screen?
Can not be understood in the symbolic scene of the closed door
Or staring at your eyes
Where the meaning of the mind underplays in the vision- montage
Cinema has finished -- not the life
Life is not a shooted film
No spectators are there -- so no one understands
Society is there -- not an individual direction
Still you and I are staring at each other from then on
Feeling with hands that the door remains beetween the border membrane of you and me
Opening which nowhere can be entered
Strange! Nothing can be seen even through the magic eye
Only it is to be felt -- two young boy and girl are in between here
Doing something-Oh! In the turbulent stirrings of life.
Stopping in the Rain - Suddenly
1
If rain comes - I'll bring it into my mind
Afterwards the river overflows
That is not mine solely.
If rain goes to her instead of me
I'll tell it to fill in the sky of her heart
But where shall I go?
The metro towards Tollygunge is coming with a roaring sound
With much more roar comes in the Dumdum going train
Simultaneously in the next platform.
I am perplexed and confused.
Only a few seconds are there
Oh Barun, the god of rain - give your mystic utterance in the microphone
Appear in the short circuit television
Because being at the station or getting in the train
In no way it can be understood how much shower has been going on
Much above the membrane of head
Over the chest of the mind.
Not on the chest
It is a mistake
Only over - simply over just o'er the soil
In the turbulent sphere
As if for ever -
2
For a few seconds the two metro trains remain standstill
As if its a momentary ceasefire.
On which direction should I go?
When the rain suddenly has outbroken in the mind with a heavy shower
The stairs of the escalator goes upward casually with indifferent machine-likeness
And ' the doors are closing'
Oh! perinnial rain would you speak something?
'On the first day of Asad' - is now a much more distant piece of poetry.
The neonlight and shady darkness are running now--
In the tunnel in the course of metro's journey towards infinity
One cannot touch it
Moreover keeping hands outside is prohibited
A few girls are brightening the inside of the metro rake
Oh! My temple is empty
Don't know when the raindrops became the tears of my eyes
Whether it is the sound of spring or the sweet laughter of the maidens?
What actually are the utterances or words?
'Rain! Rain!' - or losing and disolving myself in love.
Now everything can be said like a spring
The word 'spring' can even be waved at a great distance-resounding beautifully
Perhaps I may lose the spring in my distant eyesight fixed in the Truth
So it is better to keep the spring inside the heart
Forever restless, full of current but kept within.
Sorrow has at last stripped itself
Coming at me
Secretly.
Tell me something
Come oh! the creater
Now there's no word
Someone here's very much lonely
A single tune from a guiter is seeking for an empty space
Now I am like a lost letter
Now ther's no love or memory.
Only in the blue moment
The world remains alone.
Dr. Arup Ratan Ghosh (b. 1959) is a poet, cultural journalist, a film scholar, an expert on the Theatre of the Absurd, Postmodernism, and Cultural Theory. He writes for the leading newspapers, magazines and journals like Ananda Bazar Patrika, Desh, Anandalok, Theatre International, Cinema India International, Celluloid etc. He is a poet, story writer and has published three books of poems and stories in Bengali. (To get the book of poems and stories contact the author.) He has a Ph. D. degree on the 'Impact of the European Theatre of the Absurd on Modern Bengali Playwrights'. He edits a serious film journal Views Reviews Interviews which is also available in the internet at http://www.geocities.com/arghosh and ( http://www.geocities.com/postmodernismandcinema ). His other sites of English short stories Body and Images of Mouman ( http://www.geocities.com/tellsstory ) and French poems La poésie Indien transperant en française ( http://www.geocities.com/indianpoem ) are also in the Net. He lives at Calcutta in India. He is a bachelor.
The poet wishes friendship from similar souls.
Written and created by Arup Ratan Ghosh
©Arup Ratan Ghosh
Please write your comments and other communications to: arghosh@satyam.net.in
created on 16 May, 1999 : Latest update: 1st June 2002
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