Kapil Muni Tiwary- Three Poems

You My Poem

 

Come to me

When light is low, not quite out,

Silently;

And be with me

When darkness thickens

And night descends overwhelmingly.

Sing to me 

In floral tones;

In simple rhymes

of light and life and love;

of whatever is in short supply on earth. 

You owe it to me.

You are my poem

In gossamer veil

A piece of my being on wings:

An indigent prayer,

A meagre offering; a cri de coeur; unheard 

Heavenwards winging.

you are innocent, humility and inexorable solitude.

You are my poem.

 

Lonely by nature,

Lonelier in a crowd,

Indifferent to sacred shrines

I meet you at the crossroads of culture

Always.

Prone to pray at penumbral places,

Scared by the glare of marketplaces,

At dead of night I worship

At bare open spaces,

Darkness and light commingling,

At the crossroads of culture.

On a Birthday

 

Older than my earliest memories;

Younger than my last night's dream;

You come.

Eternal, yet recurrent, you come

Indifferent to one.

Pregnant with possibilities,

Loaded with promises

You are welcome to all.

You add to my age 

What you take from my life away:

One plus one plus one each year,

Gifting debris from the past in your wake

Promises revoked, possibilities dispersed

I celebrate you nevertheless,

And wait for you nevertheless.

Looking backward and forward

Straight and across my life,

Dreading the day I'll not

Be waiting for you to come,

Will not be waking for you at all,

Early or late, then or ever.

Coda: A Meta-poem

 

A poem lives briefly,

As a sequence of phones

But dies, quite quickly, on the wind.

Survives as a system of sense,

proposing a personal range of pleasure and pain:

Purely personal, scaringly intense,

Sometimes the one, sometimes the other,

Sometimes blending the two in equal measure,

Fugitive feelings animating the whole

Waking a swell of wild desires,

Licking the heart with tongues of five,

Articulating structures of impersonal passions.

A poem is a funny thing,

If you feel into it, you are changed by it,

But if you don't, you are not,

A funny thing when you come to think. 

 

Bio: Kapil Muni Tiwary did his MA and PhD in Linguistics from University of Pennsylvania and worked as professor of Linguistics and English Literature in India, Iraq and the Republic of Yemen. He has carried out research on languages like English, Bhojpuri, Hindi, Sanskrit and Arabic and several of his articles have been published in well known journals. These include The Echo-word Construction in Bhojpuri and Tuneful Weeping: A Mode of Communication. He is also the author of Panini's Description of Sanskrit Nominal Compounds and Language Deprivation and the Socially Disadvantaged: With special Reference to Bihar. At present he lives at Patna, India. Of late he has started using poetry as a mode of his expression.