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
Romance of Her Hand
A dark hand, a terrible door of pain, separates us. Guilt's weight forbids all touch.
March 14, 2019
The little girl’s hand is made of darkness
How will I hold it?
The streetlamps hang like decapitated heads
Blood opens that terrible door between us
The wide mouth of the country is clamped in pain
where its body writhes on its bed of nails
This little girl has just her raped body
for me to reach her
The weight of my guilt is unable
to overcome my resistance to hug her.
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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.