A Poem by Jayanta Mahapatra[private][/private]

[private]her night thoughts My baby wails. That I may restI offer him a rubber breastAnd soon as waves by oil suppressed,He quiets. An underhanded trickYet practical and politic-He cries for bread. I give him brick,But when night circles round to fourI open to him like a doorAnd yield him all he wants and more.As old wives say, it may be trueThat love too frequent can undo.Sometimes give just the likes of you.Your lover’s tide may rise in floodWhen there’s no answer in your blood.Then let that raging bull chew cudAnd go to sleep. Let him returnWhen in coincidence you burn.Fire lingers near a kindled urnAnd lives to burn again and spreadsOn real as on imagined bedsHeld fast by things that stand in steads.[/private]

Herein the dusty malarial lanesof Cuttack where years have slowly lost their secretsthey wanderin these lanes nicked by intrigue and rainand the unseen hands of godsin front of a garish temple of the simian Hanumanalong river banks splattered with excreta and dungin the crowded market square among rotting tomatoesfish-scales and the moist warm odour of bananas and pisspassing by the big-breasted, hard-eyed young whoreswho frequent the empty space behind the local cinemaby the Town Hall where corrupt politicians stillgo on delivering their pre-election speechesand on the high road above the town’s burning-groundfrom which gluttonous tan smoke floats upin the breeze, smacking of scorched marrow and doubt.Herelike the unreal stirringsof incense smoke in a darkened shrinelike the languid movements of mangled lepersaround a temple of the [...]