NAZIR WANI

NAZIR WANI

POET: THE REDEEMER

"Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world", cried Yeats,

Arnold too wept elegiacally in his "Dover Beach"!

Both visioned the pain and anarchy,

The world had been gripped in.

How can a poet be caught napping

In our times fraught with miseries?

The premonition of prejudiced nationalism

Looms large on the whole grid of the globe;

Universal brotherhood thrown to the winds,

Nukes race and monstrous bombs,

Have narrowed the distance to the doomsday;

Syria here, Palestine there,

France here, the US there,

Where human souls are rent apart,

Along with the world, Kashmir too

Where the Jhelum has turned red,

The apartheid straggle so ubiquitously

Searing, bleeding, wailing and shrieking;

A poet does not feel but melancholy,

And echoes the concern of that Prince:

"The time is out of joint—O cursèd spite,

That ever I was born to set it right!"

What can his sanguinolent pen write

Save pain, pangs, elegies for the oppressed?

How can he eulogize the spring

When it too gushes out blood?

But! A poet can hold a mirror to all,

To show the concealed real interior

And make us see our beastly being

Under the thick human fleshly skin;

It is the poet, Ay! It is the poet

Who can harbour rays of hope

In the parched hearts of all the forlorn,

And can illuminate a golden dawn

That shall herald an effulgent era,

From the east to the west afar!

Fostered will be the universal fraternity

Love will beat in all the hearts;

And the world will sing with the bard:

"God is in His heaven,

All's right with the world."

EDGELESS REALM

The other night I was cruised in my dream,

Up in the realm spread so vast,

Like an uncircumferenced ring

Of pristine and endless light!

How could my vision assimilate the aura all,

Where time - present, past and future

Intersect, and lines in between blur;

Heard the soulful music of the spheres,

Emanated while they danced in whirl;

And, was reminisced of the lines of Yeats:

"O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

How can we know the dancer from the dance? "

I visioned the Oneness in all-

Time, Space and their continuum I saw;

Ay! I journeyed through Eternity,

But! couldn't unriddle where the edge was,

Neither in my dream, nor when I was awake!

ACCRETION

The morose winds howled dismally,

All about the space of my haunted psyche;

All the corpuscles of my cold serum

Palpitated fretfully in their heavy bosom,

Harboured with the hordes of bete noire.

No more did zephyr carry the spirit

To rejuvenate my fragmented soul.

Plethora of pain accrued - inexorable pain,

Thus accreted layer by layer in my marrow's mush and goo;

Agony accreted phantoms of uncountable tear droplets

Brimming and brewing my additive being.

My soul hallowed abundantly with the accretion

Of the latent salts raining on its baked soil,

Fusing its cracks and crevices;

And profluently flowed a stream there

Of ecstasy and elation - currents

Of hope sans any trace of hopelessness,

Like a woman in her coarse screams

Of labour pangs delivers a new life.

QUEST FOR EFFULGENCE

A half-hidden moon,

Hung like a dead corpse

On the entangled boughs of my soul's tree;

Its tenebrous beams scattered higgledy-piggledy

All about the shadowy and murky ambience;

I groped for the semi-illuminated

Fragments of my disintegrated being,

But! My set of fingers kissed the dust

And couldn't assemble the pieces all;

The moon too fell down with a thud,

But heaved a deep sigh of relief

On being released from the clutches of the tree;

It fell and I saw it wane to its last dregs;

No light, not a ray, neither within nor without;

My being still in disintegration,

Waiting agog for some streaks of effulgent light

To reflect on those pieces of my being

That my dusty fingers can find,

And put them into something ensemble

My soul wishes to enter into a wedlock with!

TRANSMIGRATION

Wrenching out from the waters of earth,

Hidden in those hazy plumes of vapours,

Swaggeringly you cruise to the heights atop,

On the strong wings of the wafting air;

Clandestinely you condense thereupon,

The clouds chariot you all about

On their seemingly strong shoulders,

Which can't carry you when you earn mass,

And you slip down for a long fall;

My eyes too follow you drop down

To the ground where I stand in awe;

And how you kick the dry dust particles!

And how they move helter-skelter!

How one drop chases another in race!

And all follow the trodden paths,

To mingle and disappear again in the waters;

The cycling story recycles and recycles.

O Drop of rain! What cosmic order you follow?

Are you too imprisoned in "Awagawan"?

Will you never achieve " mukti" like me?

SPRING

Winter aroma had induced

Drowsy numbness in earth's soul;

Ineffable was the warp and weft

Of the dreams haunting the woodchuck;

All the roots and all the seeds

Suffocated deep down the crust;

A zephyr blew gently about,

Whispered in the earth's ear:

Shed your slumberous winter's rest

And don the gown of emerald green,

Breathe out the fragrant breaths of life,

Infuse into the roots deep

The rejuvenating spirit of resurrection;

All abruptly the earth's heart

Bubbled with the sprightly beats,

And harbingers of the spring season,

Perched on the bowery boughs,

Crooned an endless vernal songs;

Little lambs gamboled about

In the verdurous mazy meadows;

The buzzing bees sucked in nectar

And the pollen didn't make them sneeze;

The iris pierced through the ground

With hugging fine soil along;

I beheld and beheld all this occur

Unawares, sans my volition,

I too gamboled with little lambs,

Sung songs with that woodchuck;

Was charioted past the Glades,

And, I too became one with Nature!

DILEMMA

Puzzled I stand with my fingers crossed,

In the midst of chaos and confusion;

Vacillating between light and darkness,

Torn between fact and falsehood;

Light - a candid way to salvation.

Darkness - a condemned path to doom.

Fact - the morning rays of the sun.

Falsehood - the black wisps of night.

I - a Hamlet of Denmark in lurch,

"To be" on the right, "not to be" on the left.

Should I wait for my destiny to decide

Which way it does chose for me?

Or should I muster my courage of will

To carve my destiny that behooves me?

O' my so indeterminate being

Tell me how can you be appeased?

NAZIR WANI