Thursday, December 18, 2014

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. 
 

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