The Portrait and 3 other poems
From silent ruins, a harrowing scream exposes patriarchal structures, historical trauma and…
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From ULR
Issue 2 – Resist
Mask of Longing
Dying Mariam's silence hides historical trauma behind an invisible mask of ruin.
March 14, 2019
The hospital ward
is dying of an unknown thirst.
A time when even oxygen
seems to hiss cruelly
into the still holes of Mariam’s nose.
And all words of consolation
merely graze in the land
of their own silence.
In those crumpled eyes of hers
the light of death
goes on gathering shadows.
And I feel I’m late with my life.
An agony with twenty feet throbs on.
Truth holds toward her
an invisible mask for her to wear,
as a land haunted
by the cries of women made hostages by history
sinks
into the silent vengeance of ruin.
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PART OF A COLLECTIONThe Portrait and 3 other poems
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Jayanta Mahapatra
Jayanta Mahapatra (1928) is a bilingual poet and has published over 40 volumes of poetry in English and Odia, translations, short stories, essays, and memoirs, and has been featured in numerous anthologies. In the late seventies, he founded and edited Chandrabhaga, a literary magazine dedicated to Indian writing. The first Indian poet writing in English to be awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award for Poetry in 1982, he is also the recipient of numerous awards and honours, such as, the Jacob Glatstein Memorial Award for Poetry in 1975, the Allen Tate Poetry Prize from The Sewanee Review, the SAARC Literary Award, and the Padma Sri by the President of India in 2009, which he returned in 2015 as a mark of protest against the growing ‘moral asymmetry’ in the country. In 2017, he was awarded the Kanhaiyalal Lifetime Poetry Award at the Jaipur Literature Festival. He currently lives in Cuttack, Orissa.