Sunil celebrates the summer breeze and looks into the hollowness of material glitz of Europe in travel brochures. Here’s a protest poem, rooted in urban sensibility, in Different Truths.
Hear it sing!
The breeze.
It whispers
In the sun-kissed meadows
Outside the urban sprawl
Of the buildings covered
With exhaust residue,
The wind sings a sonorous song
Heard often in the summers of a romantic Europe.
(Romantic Europe? Well, as per the glossy travel brochures and websites. Ads. –
hide grim facts and economic ruins.)
A kind of rustling of fine China silk
Delicately arranged and the muted laughter
On moon-lit nights
In a boudoir of a French aristocrat
Described so well by a Turgenev or Balzac
Or perhaps other masters as well
But who cares these days?
The wind creeps in behind the solitary watcher
Startling him with a scented presence
In that lonesome meadow
Near a strip of dying river
Already yellow-faced and gasping
Due to the debris choking its innards…
The rushing of a rapid divine breath on the floor of the
Woodlands, scattering the leaves in varied directions
And agitating the spirits natural in that early gloom.
The wind!
Playing with the moving trees, in a dark clump
In the poetic Billund where air is pure nectar
And flowers wink at the South Asian visitor
Not used to such a pure sanctuary.
The breeze rising joyously
In the brown meadow
Like the musical notes of a concert
to be
Played fast, briskly and with gusto
By a mystical composer, high above
The green canopy!
The summer breeze…musical
For the Indian ear that can hear
Sounds, ignored/ unheard, in daily rush
For grim survival in grime and dust!
Picture design Anumita Roy
A humble word-worshipper: catcher of elusive sounds, meanings and images. Published 27 creative and critical books— joint and solo. A winner of, among others, the Panorama Golden Globe Award-2023, and, Nissim Award for Excellence-2022 for the novel Minotaur. His poems were included in the prestigious UN project: Happiness: The
Delight-Tree: An Anthology of Contemporary International Poetry, 2015.
Editor of the monthly Setu journal (English):
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