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
The Portrait
Evening's rigid face, a dark stroke; souls hold shadows as murdered land's footsteps inexorably approach.
March 14, 2019
This evening, its face rigid
as though it had had a stroke.
A large owl burrows deep into its steamy air,
our souls hold the soft darkness when
each one of us becomes
an invalid turned stiffly to his bed.
We remain sitting together,
incapable of getting any farther.
Only the footfall of someone
approaching from the murdered land.
Only the infinite kingdom when
you can’t stop anyone from a simple pain.
Does a raped sixteen-year-old girl
build a hymn of the world
where living is a flamboyant metaphor?
Just this evening,
blacked like he yin half of the symbol
where death can go on proclaiming its vanity.
Walls of our world, where are you?
The evening takes whatever comes drifting in.
Aimless, I prowl through reports about justice.
All I have is a face, rigid and helpless
as though it had a stroke.
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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.