all in black
crash-helmeted outriders
faceless behind tinted visors
come thundering from one end of the road
and go roaring down the other
shattering the petrified silence of the night
like a delirium of rock-drills
preceded by a wailing cherry-top
and followed by a faceless president
in a deathly white Mercedes
coming from the airport and going downtown
raising a storm of protest in its wake
from angry scraps of paper and dry leaves
but unobserved by traffic lights
that seem to have eyes only for each other
and who like ill-starved lovers
fated never to meet
but condemned to live forever and ever
in each other's sight
continue to send signals to each other
throughout the night
and burn with the cold passion of rubies
separated by an empty street.
Arun Kolatkar
P.S. -- Among other things, I have a pile of (work and other) writing to do and yet words won't come easy. On days such as these, the best solace I get is in poetry; like the poem here -- composed, crafted and "ciphered" in the way only Arun Kolatkar can :-) Reading this poem with an intimate eye, trying to picturise that thundering motorcade and visualizing myself sitting besides Arun Kolatkar (I do meet him a lot in my thoughts and dreams, but we rarely talk, both are equally taciturn) as he selects and fits in the "just-right" and "descriptive" word to accentuate, strengthen or delineate (deathly white, delirium, ill-starved) the lines of what he is shaping into a poem, deciphering what he "says" and leaves "unsaid" is just priceless as a release.
P.P.S. --
At
my Oxford Bookstores event, a gentleman had wanted to know my opinion
on "how much of poetry eludes logic" and left me totally nonplussed. Does poetry even exist on the same plane as (lay) logic?
Can any of
the instruments / tools (I am not sure
if the word is right) of poetry -- allegory, imagery, metaphor, irony
(to name just a few) be considered "logical" in the literal sense of the
word -- do they appeal to / mesh with our own natural progression of
thoughts and sense of logic? Or, is it that poetry has got its own sense
of logic and unless one sees a poem with that sense of logic one sees
nothing? What do you see in this poem?
I have recently grown to love visual poetry and this one's so good.
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing it
Yes Divenita; you can "see" the loneliness of the traffic lights, no? And he is a master at not only how he chooses / paints the subject / visual but also in the way he creates the just right setting for it!
ReplyDelete