God, Save Me From Indian English Poets Poem by Bijay Kant Dubey

God, save me, save me from the Indian English poets,
Save me, save me, God from
The Indian poets calling themselves great poets,
Poets and poetesses
Not of India, but of England, America and Canada.

God, lo, they are coming,
Coming to attend a seminar
With papers into their hands
To read,
Let me,
Let me hide in
Or you save me God.

God, save me, save me from Indian English poets,
If one calling oneself a Wordsworth another Keats,
If one Byron another Shelley,
If one Coleridge another Southey,
I do not know
Whom to call what,
I do not know it, God.

If one is Spenser another Wyatt,
If one Milton another Donne,
If one Herrick another Herbert,
If one Marvell another Blake,
My God, so many poets are born
In India itself,
My God!

If one calls oneself Blake another Gray,
If one Hardy another Lawrence,
If one calls oneself Tennyson another browning,
If one Bridges another Mare,
If one Masefield another Hopkins.

My God, to them, I am but a trifle man,
They are scholars, scholars,
They men of scholarly pursuits
And what am I before them,
The divinely inspired fellows,
God-gifted organ voices of India?

But if I call them that they have copied and parodied
The English masters
They may beat me too
After tearing my shirt and pants
And after being beaten I may have
To take to my recourse
Slowly and sadly
If oppose I.

God, save me, save me from the Indian English poets,
Poets and poetesses,
The poets of England and America not,
But of India
Calling themselves,
The Hindi, Odia, Tamil, Telegu,
Himachali, Punjabi, Gujarati, Marathi,
Bengali men and women
Calling themselves poets and poetesses.

If a poetess calls oneself a Sylvia Plath another Judith Wright,
If one Emily Dickinson another Christina Georgina Rossetti,
My God, you say it to me,
Who is what
As I cannot them,
How to live in the country of the scholar poetesses
And if be this, who will cook food in the house
If they come to the poetic conferences
And seminars
Reading their papers?

After writing their first poems,
The practitioners force us to call them poets and poetesses,
What to say about the authors
Whose books are on the anvil
Or those who have written one books at least,
My God, it is neither You fault nor mine,
It is but the blunder the White Man,
The English,
Why did they teach English,
Uncle Sam and Prospero
To Gangu Teli?

And lo, those from the northeast of India,
The treacherous mountainous ranges
They too have started calling themselves
Poets and critics
Citing the subaltern and Said’s Orientalism,
The marginalized voices
And Dalit literature,
Those from Assam, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram,
Arunachal, Tripura, Meghalaya.

But the problem is non-Dalits
Are also getting the benefit,
Those from outside the northeast
Are also calling themselves the critics of
Literature from the northeast
And the other thing is this that the men and women
Just attempting English poetry
Are novices,
The beginners of poetry,
I mean
The varsity-read, media-savvy people.