Documentos de Académico
Documentos de Profesional
Documentos de Cultura
WRITERS WORKSHOP books are published by P. Lal from 162/92 Lake Gardens, Calcutta 31. Lands Ends printers are the Calcutta Job Press Private Ltd., binders Bharati of 13 Patwar Bagan Lane.
LANDS END
Poems by Adil Jussawalla
NOTE
All the poems in this book were written in England, or some part of Europe ; that is, away from the land where I first learnt what a poem is, what poetry, and what brings both to fruition. The poems cover four to five years. They are not arranged in the order in which they were written. A. J. J.
Now, detached, the water is spilled killed on rocks, one by one the lights are snuffed dead things talk no more though I listen, and only a cold assumption of arrogance is mine.
But ah! this life! this year! That fountain! See the finger of water raised to Stop time Scattered in the swift haze of Pigeons in flight and spray, and lights, Useless against the minutes spinning with revelry Where water and bodies Swirl, and from a steaming shell Rise mermaids with leaping boys and dolphins Prepared to take the plunge But . . . .
What is the timeless here ? See, a paper star of Bethlehem Caps a Christmas commerical, And look, round its base Torn faces drift, like the Discarded dates Of an expended calendar.
Sea Voyage
P arting the thick, tangled hair of this
Watercurled woman this Grey world-weary old Dame Our ship plunged through, Sour, sick and ugly, she is Letting us brush her hair. But traveller, talk softly. Though old Lady Sea sleeps on horizons Shell stride across the waves And batter you if you insult her : And the gulls will still be waving Like children as you sink.
Yes, love for each other is out of it. Since what we keep To ourselves to grow to perfection we hold dearer Then what we give, what love grows so dearly deep As self-love ? We kissed, you were nearer My heart than its beat, but who did you see in my eyes ? Fool ! your King of Hearts has a double-edged sword And a double-face : the Joker laughs out his lies Before my silent King of Death, my dark Lord.
I hold the whole court. Think I could have packed The game before this, strung your paupers cards With my sovereign jacks of knowledge, stacked Art against your ignorance . . . It wasnt hard To deceive you. But, as the one consummation Of self-love is Death my one self-perfecting, Self-commanding Mentor hell force a conclusion When he calls his card into play : the Black King Who governs my life and my art. Ive told you now. Were quits and we must part. Should you be waiting for me tomorrow And I never come, pretend that I know Im in light : end of a game squarely packed in my heart Where all ends and kings and pretences start.
Two Postcards
1. To My Dreams You do not know how I fear you my dreams. At times I am quite terrified of you In case you lead me far from sinew, fibre. I have seen thwarted wrestlers go that way, Bloat themselves on transubstantial food And plug Religion, while women wailed about them. You do not know how you frighten me.
2. To My Songs Rot, rot, my songs, my counterfeitsnow that Ive walked In the spring rain at dawn, I see You arent worth a penny, counterfeit or real.
This is the steaming floor of Hell. Remorse, Repentence, Terror, Sex, Without the drugging asphodel. Beech skins snap. Roots dangle, mushrooms smell.
Before the April rain rinse The trees (like trunkless legs, trooped From ogrish hills ; their pubic fan Of leaves knotted, webbed With coupling, carnage) before the rains
Wash, pronged like spotted meat On twigs are offered rotten leaves To taste, for what though late rain feed? Giants know starved floors Burgeon on dregs, on rot they eat.
Here bored and exacerbated tourists fully expect to see their day-trip-convalescents miracle. Their feet paddle rings in a glaring lake. Crimson parasols, like pieces of sun-blown silk, flash. Gaudy-winged butterflies flit about white houses hung on the hill face. These are the women. A ferry steamer divides the lake.
French poodles run wild in the grass. Motorbikes lean on bridges, grand hotels keep their huge doors open, inviting the summer.
Under the weight of hills their tough boots once cracked, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and God know who, lie face upwards, sealed. Wordsworths face is a cottage industry. His village loves him.
Cliff along cliff, the slack waves drag and hit Their catch of sea-food against worn Lands End. Lord, is this manna that you send The startled tourists showered where they sit ? Black crabs splatter hard against the wall, Scuttle to landed fish in crevices on cliffs ; Lord, your netted round of deep lifts Its sweet fish to our lips ; yet fishers haul Against its tented pull ; do you extend Your power to your wan and sleeping Son, Curled on a trawler troubled in that caul ? Will he walk your Tumults first creation ?
Rock Peter wavers ; his planted footsteps fail ; The sea has fastened on ; boats rock on springs ; His sloped arms gulp the bilge seas spurning flings ; The funnel smoke is tattered like a veil. Lord, It is finished : No man, beast or fowl But needs a rocks assurance in this hour. But neither sea nor Peters praising tower Holds Peters weight. Nor winds howl ; No church stands on water ; though land sings Its consecrated rock, the sea sang earlier, To form the rock, to christen and to wreck ; The sea renews itself as old rocks break. Atlantic breakers pound our ended power.
These are the tempting minutes of hope When the darting eye must make its choice Between the slim, primeval wishes Spawned from last years weedwrapped acts. Bobbin birches climb the slope, The tongueless turtle finds its voice, The river bucks with pairing fishes, Wildbloodstreams wreck our rooted facts.
And these are the sudden weeks of learning From spinning winds ; rewinding reels Draw in their catch ; windbaskets swing Their captured charms and doodles out ; Fragments, letters, tickets returning Scribble around my knocking heels. Love, tell me youll last the spring Shift this shifting weather out.
The Waiters Blacker than wine from the loaded grapes of France,
Blacker than mud their Tamil minds recall, Dark skins serving dishes to the sallow Sweat more night than grapesblood has ; all The long summers they abjured, for chance Of better prospects, change, a sun of contrast, Stick in a language their clients wont allow. Must button up their manners with the past. Grow expert on the epicures stuffed heart. Polite of speech, punctilious, guarded, kind, As guardians of good taste, their smudged eyes know The soiled and cluttered kitchens of the mind ; The rancid oils where sweeter dishes start, Cooked, like a pick-ups words, the soot-black roof Behind our pasted smiles ; their darkness grew To insight in their day ; they stand aloof. But slacken in their service after eleven. Guarding the days unending apetites, Grow shift-eyed, avoid our munching faces ; The jab, the polish of our eating rites ; Then closing time ; they dream of a foodless heaven, Shrug of their coats like priestly coats of pity, Days ministry complete, slip to their sleeping places In the threat of the feasted, pink-faced city.
Accepts the uncoloured, the less uneasy By stance, who fidget no detail ajar, Test no beds, whisper, sneak ; Have no guests or pets or baths ; Do not disturb, with loosening talk, Her blunt, patriotic sexual knot. The lodgers, decent, see she is paid In advance, punctually, sleep with the maid. Is uncertain of life on her gasringed mornings ; Time is a leakage somewhere, her memories Housekeep solvently ; she accuses the maid Of vulgarity ; their hands, burlesqued with breakfast, Circle in blenched clouds of spite Like pale poodles ; would fling the bowls, Shout, give notice to quit, to-day, Discover their talents in the expensive city . . . . But for a way of keeping decent, But for the decent lodgers, stay.
But poppies in bloodstained times are rue For rememberance, revolts, uprisings : red flags Flutter and twist in paranthesis, Spot the waving, political field.
Like scales of a red dragon in Chinese streets, Like a scarfdance by furious Cossack children.
Outside the cars Slunk away To sniff another Street ; passed Sulking, hulking, Flaunting, flouncing, Pouting, slouching, Crowing, cackling, Glinting, hinting. Leering, steering, Four ladies of Brussels, drinking.
Evening On a Mountain
The valley sunned itself all day, its span Curving up two foothills ; then the shadows Crossed like wings across its back ; further, Ferries embroidered a slim lake, stitching Silk into its cotton, prows snipping . . . . How still it was then ! the sky thin and hollow, Deflecting the words stoned across the valley, The ears straining at each rebound ; far off, A cloud, launched from a rock, streaked North like a startled bird.
Les Clochards
Three figures Rodin might have carved Or Daumier drawn : three clochards Slouch on a shelf outside the Louvre. Their mouths hang open, wet and slack, With sunlight tumbling down the black hollow in their toothless heads. A woman propped against the calm Storehouse, crooks a ragged arm Across the sleeper or her lap. Their faces capped against the sun Shine like full-moons, bloated, red, While baskets stuffed with straw and bread Squat around them : wasted ones, Sleeping in the gaudy suns Of noisy, Paris afternoons ; Three clochards prolonging night, Sqeaking in the fevered light, While women, azure, gold and white Cadence by the huddled forms : Comme si elle voit en toute forme La lumiere et la douceur. La Jocande ? Oui and up the steps ; While the hunched and huddled shapes Exude peculiar musky odours Of strongly acid piss and sweat.
A La Reine Blanche
Garcon, I will always remember certain dreams Associated with your serving the petite mademoiselle Un cafe au laitfor that was when you looked Most like God when He fell in love With Himself and Beauty and forget His uglier clients.
Gauntlet
The sun flayed to shreds by branches When fleeing through a birchwood : This barbarity seen in England through a coach.
Halt X
I I do not know what station this is, or why We broke our journey ; checked, here in Derbyshire, One senses danger, disquietude only. Pieces of smoke litter the huddled town Card collage on felt ; no pattering movement On roads of sliding newspaper, sidling dog, No alighting or descending the steps of its drizzling doors. II
Rain fell like a drizzle of fine slag On an anonymous town in smudged Derbyshire. I counted sixty chimneys in a quarter The size of a burghers courtyard, wondered at smoke Sliding edgeways through the dawns widening slats. A flock of pigeons dissolved in the viscid air Like a piece of mud in a current ; 5 oclock. A streetlamp craned its neck for the spreading frogs.
A Bomb-site
As if the broken stumps were a girls Starved shoulders ; as if the dusty rubble Were her hair starfished across a pillow, I would push my fingers through its grit.
I would press my bones into the bony Shoulders of these scarred homes, as I pass above their sardined tops, concealed ; Reach out and grasp and clean the greasy tin.
But children throwing stones, trenched behind mounds, Holler and kill and crumple like stale newsheets, Unsatisfied with spotless skies of peace, And I begin to count my enemies.
Violence is a culture found on playgrounds. Cities fall to let their children breathe.
A Prospect Of Oxford
The roundabouts of shadow turn the domes And windows click and glitter in the light. Under an Autumn wheel of clouds, the pale Citys made unreal by the height. Towers crowd a broad, open palm, Trees and rooftops scribble up its fingers ;
A river cut in black : coloured, calm Rafts flow up and down this asphalt Styx ; A train goes cutting through the stones with smoke ; And soldiers, camouflaged in leaves and sticks. Idle on hills or guard the chapel towers. A sundial stares its signal from a wall . . .
The sundial cannot hold the spinning hours. Downstairs, our lives are timed, our tongues run down, Nervesprings snap and silent heads explode.
And should some Terror pitch the towers down, And I see things in quite a different light, This prospect will remain behind my eyes. . . .
Two Cuttings
I. The Academician
Where the fish swims through seas of books, I swim. Where the dog sniffs, so do I. From book after book of the poets reading, track His sources, would follow where he has gone. But please, please, not on the Acheron. Obits. from The Times
II.
Professor Dunbarton, on leave from the University of Osaka, Leaving his letters to inspect the Japanese fir on his lawn, Was cut down by silent samurai on casual horses Before he could touch it. Mr. Carpenter, retired from the University of Allahabad, Collapsed ( but placidly ) over his Decline and Fall.
Fog
grey grey grey the invisible tern cries When smoke hangs wet and rises painfully Lord, what vacant songs rise ? My songs, like charred paper Over the fuming stoke Furnaces, fall to the invisible river, but the world, Flesh and devil crowd in my skull like smoke.
David
And was the palace empty when the boy, Grained in the planks of ceremony, brushed the harp With thumbs of wood, thudding dull, unwilling To light its wires ; his heart a jug of water. Squat in a clang the ringing room vibrated, Its film panicked to rings around its fear ? And did he hear those feet pace The hall, courtyard laughter, distant sheep, Know what brought him here To see, left in the cold courts of Saul, Cleft on the dented javelin, Sauls cracked tear ?
A monstrous joke has just occurred to me. Supposing you and I ( connective, we ) Were nothing more than two young leaves of tea Being in hot water Continuously Excessively Dispensably Wed solve the age-old problems easily. Deep in the tea-pots streaming void I stare Like William Yeats into his youth and try To read the leaves A Stranger, Death, DESPAIR ! Is this all we amount to ? To steam, to sweat to stew, To make a brew For a vague mouth ( we, once-kissed, knew ) For Love whose face we dare not see On pain of death : who sips his tea Serenely Contentedly Incumbently Buddha drinking tea-wine out of china !
While in time We line our habitation in with lime, The sun plates our outside bright with silver ( Since were been up in space, we know we Look quite Heavenly Azurely Leisurely What a beautiful blue ! Maj. Gagarin, April 12th 1961. Boy! What a view! Mr. Alan Shepard, May 5th, 1961. ) Letting the Great Tea-Taster pour us out In boiling water from the spout Interlocked more Firmly Than Virgils damned those Autumn leaves in Hell (ref. Book VI line 309) or His bloodhound Dantes. Never again will I drink cups of tea Madly, O so Gladly, since I Maintain Consistently Persistently Precisely, that People in hot water clung like tea.
The Song
I it was a winters song The bright sea brought. The sea broke its crust Across our newfound land Summer ended thin When jackboot traders crossed Our island babble through. As, through the ignorant years. The sea flashed like tin, A piebald language stamped Presumptious hooves on green, Muddled children : some woke Twisted, crippled, grew To scorn the marks ; some woke To knowledge of the grain The settling tribe had sown. Found the sowers gone ; Their fields page, rock ; Their tongues grain, stone. II Some took the song to heart, Stood in the sharp waves And scrawled the full say Of the grave, confessing sea. Some went out to grass Midocean, drinking miles Of death to a luminous floor. Some sailed out to gain Palms from the temperate grass. Over the whistling wheat The sun danced on and on. Their wordseeds mouldered white About their lock-jawed tongues, To each a winters death. Out went the tepid sun ! Some went dumb, some blind, Some, at the Gates of Wrath, Thundered, past all wit, Dispeopled, out of mind.
III Three years, one crossing later, Out of the shrill water Bobbing words stitch A furrow through my throat. Edge of day enrols me In a scroll of words And rolls me out at night. I stop on all hundreds, Inlay rock with dust, Out by a crowded bay Where bones, teeth, skins Of dead companies lie Companions of the quest, The siren-maddened, drowned ; Nick charms out of their ribs, Make music from their skins, Deck my bones with theirs, And I dance with the tepid sun ! Dance without rhyme or reason For the grave, confessing sea, And on and on I dance, And all I would undo, All magnitudes, all England, Out by the lyrical bay, Harboured in its spell, Where no one land is true.
Then I saw they were over, those careless, gardened days, and whether The rain praised by performance, next years children or the aged woods, I do not know, save That it drove me away. Away. I make an end. I wander like a mediaeval apothecary Abroad. In a pouch wriggling against my ribs, I carry a quintessence of you, not wholly without potency. Manners alter. Manners maketh me UnMan. I unmake Manners : they say one does not return to an early romance Improperly conducted : and I believe it true. April again : Devi, I come of age. Of age That shapes me make of splash and grit, rocks like yours, instruct me in my art, Lacking a legendary muse, give my chaos form. Should you refusethe rack of your hovels raising only your voice Still furtherdemand nothing ; touch me only as far As the parted psyche can stand ; divided city, combine, And I shall return and pass beyond your storm.
The Flags
Wavering loads of winter are being whipped Off the flags as they whirr and flap On barges ; crosses, eagles, side by side ; Brown pieces of sun, creaking in their first Unparcelling this year, more beautiful than swan or waterbird. Flying planes of colour flick the spring Trees, colour of crocus, or bright anemone Against the thin green ; fat ; the stiff Cloth ripples in the chilly air, and cracks. Time for retribution : for the natural order to assert The bland, unchanging blaze of artificial things That cannot moult or die : like the broad flags. These only wandering, drab, disordered, who, Surviving winters fractures, misapplied A frozen artifice on the natural will Actors, whose blank masks gape out of season At the tiny, relevant leaves, Denied their punctual withering ; While all along their choked, interior streams Invisible hands raise The accusing lights of the tattered bloods flags.
The Spiders
Spiders cower along the wall. Wind blow gentle, wind blow curbed between the windows sparkling cracks Spiders must not be disturbed.
Who build and drop and build again ; Labourers far too suave to sing ; For theres no wool to stop the cold, Theres no silk to stuff the crack, Theres no trapped companion, English Spiders, encouraged, will not bring.
Drake
The Chinese would know how to paint it This ducks simple stillness Sealed web of flesh and bone, Floating. But webbed in English ironies I cough and note the beaded blue-green neck retracted against the wings ; the squat wooden shape compact as a walnut music-box, charged with spikes, but playing no notable tune.
Yet the Chinese say these quaint boxes Play distinct melodies In tune with the hidden intricate stars the dipping dragon-flies, the rushes. Too bad for the ears England has plugged With its contempt four years now. They hear mere noises, Discordant, disjointed, jarring, Like pedants gabbling.
Bats
Shut in our jackets by the pale-green figs We clung a branch and slept, till dawn exposed The town and your grandmother praying ; blind, We sensed her shadow trembling on the twigs ; When she admonished Satan in her prayers, We flew away to give her peace of mind. Bats, bats you cried, and shutting up your ears Scrambled for cover, while we dived and bombed Peasants, beggars, rich fathers, richer sons. We dropped like jackfruit by the hunters guns, Or tore like paper on your sizzling wires. Manchild, remember what doctrinal fears Flapped up when you saw not flying-fox Nor dog nor mouse when hunting arms brought back So many pink-tongued babies in a box.
White Peacocks
At first we wondered, albinos, whether the cold Had cut your throats, as we watched you lie Like bales of unmelted snow, pressed Over the warmth the sun in winter lays Deep in the shut, incubating earth. In the muted gardens steady sinking, Watched your strengthening wing-bones flap and lift Your cut bodies into the flaying chestnut Its bole of branches, your nights cage. You were so gentle, even the snow frightened you As you squirmed for cover under Its impossible hail of grubs : their boxes Melted in your beaks. February, March. . . . then, in the opening month We heard your jarring cries Flash out like scratched steel, as though Under your necks you were cats, Flames under the snow, Terror smothered by grace. Now, outcry the sun ; or, in the later season Of bees and chestnuts, shatter our pedantic calm With the stark, unreal fire of your call So that our masks crack and mouths speak Against the clear poise of these pretending walls ;
As long as I see your swift, muscular flight, Your glide back to earth, your fan of eyes, Why should a scribblers moral of silence and exile Enter our perfect relationship : your hundred eyes Dancing in Time and mine ?
Sufficient the moral in my nearing departure, And the prevalence of coarser things.
1961