The Explosion

In memory of the victims of the Virginia Tech massacre, and also of the countless massacres ongoing over the world.

The Explosion

On the day of the explosion
Shadows pointed towards the pithead:
In the sun the slagheap slept.

Down the lane came men in pitboots
Coughing oath-edged talk and pipe-smoke,
Shouldering off the freshened silence.

One chased after rabbits; lost them;
Came back with a nest of lark's eggs;
Showed them; lodged them in the grasses.

So they passed in beards and moleskins,
Fathers, brothers, nicknames, laughter,
Through the tall gates standing open.

At noon, there came a tremor; cows
Stopped chewing for a second; sun,
Scarfed as in a heat-haze, dimmed.

The dead go on before us, they
Are sitting in God's house in comfort,
We shall see them face to face -

Plain as lettering in the chapels
It was said, and for a second
Wives saw men of the explosion

Larger than in life they managed -
Gold as on a coin, or walking
Somehow from the sun towards them,

One showing the eggs unbroken.

-Philip Larkin

Even when we have no clue where we are going with our lives, and I sometimes do get the feeling I am making up the story on the go, there is a feeling that it will all make sense at the end, years, perhaps decades, from today. I have no idea what it must feel like, if some lunatic comes out of nowhere and picks up this story you are writing, tears off the last page, and says, sorry but it has to end right here. How unfair that must feel, and how helpless.

Koi Sukha Hua Patta tha...

Nida Fazli reads his beautiful nazm valid ke vafat par (on the death of my father) here. He was unable to attend his father's funeral because he could not afford the journey.

You can also listen to his hamd (in praise Of God). Its certainly the quirkiest hamd one is likely to hear.

The South Asian Literary Recordings Project records the works of writers writing in different South Asian languages, in their own voice.

I have a fascination with poets reading their works. What a poet emphasizes, and what he/she does not, tells so much about how they interpret their own poems.

A New Poet Arrives

A New Poet Arrives

A new man flies in from Manchester.
Fran Frittlewood.
Death to the Public Schools,
Ready to piss in the eye of the Old Universities.

A big woolly striped scarf around his neck,
The hunched antagonism of a left wing student,
How right he is!
Through immense spectacles he sees clearly

That only a New Movement can save our souls.
Wordsworth's great beak was pecking at that apple.
The tree of knowledge,
Dividing line between the past and future.

Take off those vestments, and those vested interests.
Show as a naked soul. You must admit
He's onto something.
Change, in the Arts, is nearly always good.

- Gavin Ewart

The sarcasm almost killed me.
Gavin Ewart, an admirer of Auden and also Betjeman, is generally known for his light verse. There is, in his obituary in The Independent, another poem excerpt; containing, in characteristic english (or desi) style, a cricket reference.

First day at school

First day at school
the large boy
kindly
hurled my ball
with amazing skill
high over the roof

soaring out of sight
out of my prosaic life

Unstintingly
I gave him
my admiration

As others have done
when their respect
money
virginity
honour hope and lives
have been hurled
triumphantly out of sight

- Michael Ivens(1914-2001)

First day at school, I was accosted by two kids on my way back home, who made fun of me and the stupid little briefcase-like steel box I used to carry to school(I never understood why I used to carry that back then, and not a school bag like everyone else). The box had its purposes: I gave their heads a solid smack each with the box and executed a quick exit while they lay flat on the ground bawling their throats out.

That is the first memory I have of being uncommonly pleased with myself.

If I were called in to construct a religion...




Philip Larkin reads his poem Water.

The text is here.

Few poems showcase Larkin's technical mastery as this poem. He sounds facetious when the poem starts: whoever gets called to construct a religion? The second line seems even stranger, and you wonder if he has any idea what he is talking about. But when the poem ends, merely twelve lines later, and only thirty seconds in his reading, he has already moved from his inane premise to build the sense of a religious experience.

Like many agnostics, Larkin had a clearer conception of what religion tries to answer, than the very religious.

There is one poem where he does it even better, his celebrated High Windows . Who else could write a poem that starts with the f-word, and ends in a church, and so convincingly?

I work all day, and get half drunk at night...

The last poem Philip Larkin wrote was Aubade. An aubade is a special kind of poem, about two lovers separating at dawn. Larkin wrote his aubade to life. There is an audio recording online of him reading the poem. It is one of the most beautiful things I have ever heard.

For the visually inclined, here's a video of Alan Bennett reading Aubade, set to New Order's 'Your Silent Face'. But be warned, Alan Bennett is an excellent actor, but there ain't nothing like Aubade in the old man's voice himself :) .

And simply because I love it so much, I'll copy the poem below.

I work all day, and get half drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
- The good not used, the love not given, time
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never:
But at the total emptiness forever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says no rational being
Can fear a thing it cannot feel, not seeing
that this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no-one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

The poem's sense of depression is almost numbing, and not for everyday, but when Keats said that truth is beauty, few poets took him seriously, but Larkin did. His poems always saw life 'plain as a wardrobe', and when he faces death, he cannot see it any differently.

What is strange is, what is Larkin doing in a Crowded House video?

Taal sa hilta raha man

Dhar gaye mehndi rache
do haath jal me deep
janm-janmo taal sa hilta raha man

baanchte hum reh gaye
antarkatha
swarnakesha-
geetbandhuo ki vyatha
le gaya chunkar kamal-
koi hathi yuvraj
der tak shaival-sa hilta raha man

jangalo ka dukh
taton ki traasadi
bhool, sukh se so gayi-
koi nadi
thak gayi ladti hawaon se
abhaagi naanv,
aur jheene paal-sa hilta raha man

tum gaye kya-
jag hua andha kua
rail chhuti, reh gaya keval dhua
gungunate hum bhari aankhen-
phire sab raat,
haath ke rumal sa hilta raha man.

- Kishan Saroj

I had been planning to translate it to english, but I don't know if it will work in a translation. Definitely not in one by my hands.

You can read the poem in devanagri here .
The fonts can be downloaded here .

Fire and Ice

A long discussion on sepia mutiny today about science and religion. Reminded me of this poem.

Some say the world will end in fire;
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Ah, the not so gentle Frost. I wish we saw him more often.

The poem could be an allegory for so many things, but if science is fire and religion is ice, then I'd say it is a tossup between fire and ice.

In Minstrels Today.

Guest poem sent in by Lakshmi Jagad.

"On Death, without Exaggeration"

It can't take a joke,
find a star, make a bridge.
It knows nothing about weaving, mining, farming,
building ships, or baking cakes.

In our planning for tomorrow,
it has the final word,
which is always beside the point.

It can't even get the things done
that are part of its trade:
dig a grave,
make a coffin,
clean up after itself.

Preoccupied with killing,
it does the job awkwardly,
without system or skill.
As though each of us were its first kill.

Oh, it has its triumphs,
but look at its countless defeats,
missed blows,
and repeat attempts!

Sometimes it isn't strong enough
to swat a fly from the air.
Many are the caterpillars
that have outcrawled it.

All those bulbs, pods,
tentacles, fins, tracheae,
nuptial plumage, and winter fur
show that it has fallen behind
with its halfhearted work.

Ill will won't help
and even our lending a hand with wars and coups d'etat
is so far not enough.

Hearts beat inside eggs.
Babies' skeletons grow.
Seeds, hard at work, sprout their first tiny pair of leaves
and sometimes even tall trees fall away.

Whoever claims that it's omnipotent
is himself living proof
that it's not.

There's no life
that couldn't be immortal
if only for a moment.

Death
always arrives by that very moment too late.

In vain it tugs at the knob
of the invisible door.
As far as you've come
can't be undone.

-- Wislawa Szymborska

Gieve Patel: Desi Doctor Poet

It takes much time to kill a tree,
Not a simple jab of the knife
Will do it. It has grown
Slowly consuming the earth,
Rising out if it, feeding
Upon its crust, absorbing
Years of sunlight, air, water,
And out of its leprous hide
Sprouting leaves.

So hack and chop
But this alone won't do it.
Not so much pain will do it.
The bleeding bark will heal
And from close to the ground
Will rise curled green twigs,
Miniature boughs
Which if unchecked will expand again
To former size.

No,
The root is to be pulled out –
Out of the anchoring earth;
It is to be roped, tied,
And pulled out-snapped out
Or pulled out entirely,
Out from the earth-cave,
And the strength of the tree exposed,
The source, white and wet,
The most sensitive, hidden
For years inside the earth.

Then the matter
Of scorching and choking
In sun and air,
Browning, hardening,
Twisting, withering,

And then it is done.

- Gieve Patel

A killer of a poem, if you will excuse the lousy pun. I always admired its surgical precision, and today I discovered the poet was a doctor. Another poem by Gieve Patel, I discovered while searching for this one.

it makes sense not
to have the body
seamless,
hermetically sealed, a
non-orificial
box of incorruptibles.

Yet each man kills

Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

- Oscar Wilde


If you put the words kill and love in the same stanza, I guess you cannot go wrong.
It gets better.


Some kill their love when they are young,
And some when they are old;
Some strangle with the hands of Lust,
Some with the hands of Gold:
The kindest use a knife, because
The dead so soon grow cold.

Some love too little, some too long,
Some sell, and others buy;
Some do the deed with many tears,
And some without a sigh:
For each man kills the thing he loves,
Yet each man does not die.

Too many have lived

Too many have lived
As we live
For our lives to be
Proof of our living.

Too many have died
As we die
For their deaths to be
Proof of our dying



A story by Dashiell Hammett begins with these lines. It was in a detective story collection I had. Far as I remember, I never read the story. But the lines would jump out of the book, eight lines of verse in a book containing approximately eighty murders.

Its cliched and teenagish. But like some people are suckers for romantic comedies, I am a sucker for this kind of stuff. I am quite the armchair revolutionary.

Doing a Larkin.

Let me post my own attempt to do a Larkin, that is, try to recreate a fleeting feeling in verse.

Were we introduced again,
I will not stand frozen hapless,
Like someone caught in sudden rain.

Ok, its not a great poem. But its my blog.

Larkin's 'Coming'

There are few things more difficult in poetry than to bring alive a single moment, a single feeling, just as it was felt, before it disappeared. Larkin is the master of the epiphany.

No poet creates a moment as effectively as Larkin does. It is this skill that makes him such a great artist, and lacking this talent, his poems will get tiresome. You meet the cynical old man in every poem, whose childhood is dull, the people he meets superficial and unworthy of consideration. Yet he has an appeal, because this grouchy old man observes the world stripped of all pretension.

I have a strange favourite among Larkin's poems - Coming.

On longer evenings,
Light, chill and yellow
Bathes the serene
Foreheads of houses.
A thrush sings,
Laurel-surrounded
In the bare deep garden,
Its fresh-peeled voice
Astonishing the woodwork.

It will be spring soon,
It will be spring soon-
And I, whose childhood
Is a forgotten boredom,
Feels like a child
Who comes on a scene
Of adults reconciling
And can understand nothing
Except the unusual laughter,
And starts to be happy.

It is not as popular as some of his other works, but I still love it more, as it brings to life this moment where you are alone somewhere with nature, and you feel its beauty, but at the same time its mysteriousness. Just like a child who feels happy on seeing adults around him happy, though does not always understand why.

But Larkin could not keep the grouchy old man out of this poem either.

And I, whose childhood
is a forgotten boredom.

Some people never change.