GROWING BIG AND BEAUTIFUL

 

Monuments and shrines, no doubt,

are centre of tourist attractions,

pilgrimage and good business.

But these are not all.

A country is admired for its creative feats

and sense of justice in things big or small.

A culture is cared,

a civilization is held high

for the great minds it breeds

and the beauty of their creativity,

not just for few stone structures

or concrete camouflage of vanity.

 

The wealth of worth is aesthetic order,

intellectual health and spiritual growth

cemented with love, compassion and care.

 

Shrines are there in every city, town and village.

How many of their patrons, believers and devotees,

sticking blindly to rituals,

rise above meanness, malice

and mindset of the average?

Copyright: Bipin Patsani

 

 

THE SONG OF LOVE

 

 

Let us not be naive

to be carried away

by the rosy pictures

painted of love.

 

The more colourful

and splendid

we imagine life to be

when we involve

in such a deep

delicate relation,

the more disappointed

we will feel

when the trance is over

and we come back to sense,

in our own orbits to revolve.

 

The vast blue canvas of the sky

where we watch and wonder

at billions of stars and the moon,

looks beautiful only

when we are here on this earth.

 

Sailing and sailing across

after years of empty space,

once we are there

on a surface and meet,

It is the rock hard solid ground

we may find,

The same heat and dust,

the unfriendly crust

that will need

love’s labour to set our feet.

 

Besides what we dream,

what we fantasize our love to be

and feel ecstatic, overwhelmed,

it is something more,

not just flying  above

but connecting to

the bottom of truth

rooted to the earth,

something humble

and real to be touched

and felt within, supporting,

caring for each other,

 sharing everything,

happiness and sorrow,

wealth of ability and weakness,

open discourse and secrets,

with mutual trust and respect

complementing each other,

and above all,

it is loving, love making,

quarrelling sometimes

over the trivial,

yet sticking together

with pangs, the anguish,

the wait and watch

for each other’s way

with anxiety;

this endless eternal longing

for each other is love,

so pure and divine,

the deeply passionate and intense

emotional involvement

of two souls mingling, 

sidelining all that comes

on the way or in between,

this blending together as one

exploring all possibilities

in the gift of the divine.

Copyright: Bipin Patsani

A TRIBUTE TO MY WIFE, MANJU

 

Your silent acceptance,

Your tears tell everything,

That you could not say through the years.

The daughter of a rich Land Lord,

Choosing a home of no much means,

Quietly you loved me and never said so.

All that you cared for was my happiness.

My choice was your choice, my voice your own.

You didn’t dream of a different dawn,

Nor did you ever seek salvation

In the words of any enlightened being,

As in your perception, I was everything;

The meaning and purpose of living

In simple unadulterated conjugal love, 

Dear to one, like bliss divine.

 

While giving you all worldly things

Within my capacity, I kept a part of me

Reserved to myself in my crazy quest,

Hoping at the same time to keep you smiling,

To see you satisfied and cheerful

While you move around me.

Not interested in any other thing, you waited

Silently for that part, my errant poetic heart,

That I thought, you may not take care of.

But you nursed it and cared, I did not see.

You shared all my sorrow and like a shadow

You followed all along the path I fared.

 

Little did I know that it was me

Your lips murmured in silence

When you were all alone.

 

Far and wide I travelled, saw many a hue

As I roamed in my world of imagination

And gathered experiences new.

 

But each time I felt hurt and exhausted,

I came back to you, my loving, artless wife,

And got your cool comfort in all strain and strife.

 

I still remember that fateful day, so sad,

When once in a fit of anger I threw away

All that I had written, all that I had preserved.

 

I was spell bound to see what you did.

You were crying and crying but at the same time

Collecting from the ground those scattered sheets

 

With utmost care, collecting, as it were,

The scattered fragments of myself,

Though you never understand a word of what I write.

 

You nurtured the hope all the years of your life

With your tears, that I would understand you one day,

Since I am a poet of some sort, if not great.

 

And see, the poor poet has taken an entire life

To give due recognition to the infinite love

 Of a simple village lass who became his wife.

 

You have been a part of me, an inseparable part.

Do I need to say “I will do this for you, I will do that?”

No my wife, my mother, my sister; one life is insufficient.

Copyright: Bipin Patsani

 

BPatsani blogpost: THE FIGHT FOR RIGHT

BPatsani blogpost: THE FIGHT FOR RIGHT:

 (Dedicated to Dr Prabhat Patnaik, the brilliant JNU Professor from Khordha) 

 For their basic rights

did they fight;

not for the supremacy

of a class, caste or community.

 

In fighting for salt,

they fought for their dignity.

 

With intense passion, great hope

and immense trust they fought

that there would be no more loot

of public money, no waste of labour,

no authoritarian rule and atrocity,

no repetition of famine and poverty.

 

They fought for freedom

of choosing their fate,

they fought for liberty,

not in favour of a King’s Crown,

nor did they fight to reestablish

another kind of colonialism

of a homegrown group to frown

at them and be above people,

the ordinary common men

reducing, on the contrary, to slaves

of their clumsy isms.

Copyright:Bipin Patsani

THE POET, THE PLOUGHMAN

As I see confronting armies

from among my people

seeking my support,

telling me what they stand for,

I say, be Krishna, be Arjuna,

be Kaurav kin, Karna,

Dhritarastra, Shakuni, Drona

or whatever you like,

I will not take sides, I will not strike

so long as the game goes fair

and all is well.

 

A lover of human values,

at one with creative fraternity of all

those striving for peace and social justice,

a poet is a kind of ploughman.

His pen is his plough with which

he cultivates aesthetic pleasure,

poetic justice is his harvest, his treasure,

by which the two Poles he binds together.

 

Honest, impartial and judicious writing

is like tightrope walking in a meditative mind.

 

So, I stand apart alert and watchful,

expressing my joy when all goes well

and disappointed at times of foul play,

I express my displeasure.

 

Fare forward friends, be fair,

not that killing a monkey is no sin

if the killer is the son of a Brahmin.

 

When there is injustice anywhere

and humanity is at stake,

words shedding their softness

crush everything to pieces,

the nasty tricks of lure and deception

and all rapturous recess.

Copyright: Bipin Patsani

GOD, A POETIC IMAGE

The most refreshing source of positive energy

born from the womb of imagination,

God has ever been a mystery.

Some see the force as abstract,

for some it incarnates from time to time since ages.

My God not flesh and blood is a poetic image.

My God is a poetic image, the confluence

of contemplations, dreams and perceptions,

wherein all come, feel full, meet and merge.

 

My God is a poetic image, rather a whole poem in itself

with all its cosmic connotations, transcendental,

beyond the confines of a cage, the priestly hedge.

 

Everything visible and invisible,

my God is my day, my God is my night

and all that is envisioned

in the enlightening embers of twilight

from beginning to the end and all possible beginnings.

The entire cosmos is there in the eyes of my Lord,

everything we come across:

the crescent moon and the cross,

the calmness of the ocean in meditation,

the purgatorial fire, storm,

restlessness and pangs of the creative process,

Kaal Chakra and Karma,

the sense sublime of the compassionate mind

and all that we love to find where there is Raj Dharma.

 

This amazing poetic image,

The God of the woods and wonder,

in its unifying whole uplifts the soul,

the soul intensely passionate and humble,

and makes everything beautiful,

binding us together in its love and divine splendor.

Copyright: Bipin Patsani

CONFLICTING ICONS

When we are unable to meet

challenges we face,

we don’t have courage

to acknowledge our failures

and the disgrace.

We blame the past

on the very foundation of which

stands our present.

The complex in our minds

makes us so much narrow

in our attitude and approach

that we don’t find anything good

in the efforts of our predecessors,

busy as we are in measuring

where they failed.

 

Some makers of our destiny

are so historic, so towering

that taunts and tricks

of the tallest of us Lilliputians

 hardly affect their stature

and they stand taller ever more.

Copyright: Bipin Patsani

 

A NATION'S FACE

Our rationality reflects

the quality of our nationality.

A nation is much bigger

than whosoever holds the helm.

 

Let us not forget

that the pages of history

and the ages are vulnerable

to verification and scrutiny.

 

Captains come and go.

No one can claim

that he/she is the nation,

they leave their mark though.

 

The clever coinage

of a catchy campaign-cry

and the seductive slogans

scripted by court poets just fade away.

 

No one was the nation in the past.

No one is there either

to be acknowledged as such

what maybe the stature

in  the decadence

of some image building

sycophantic literature.

 

A nation is there in its toiling millions

who work day and night

for its echoing emancipation.

 

Time that gives itself to one

is never in paucity of options.

 

 Copyright: Bipin Patsani