Jayanta Mahapatra Poem by Bijay Kant Dubey

Jayanta Mahapatra, as I have known him,
As I have read and understood him,
The professor of physics teaching physics in his classrooms
And writing poems in English as for hobby
And he turning to it as for his avocation.

A poet, he edited Chandrabhaga,
Picked poems for the Sunday issues of the Telegraph coloured magazine
For sometime just like Khushwant Singh selecting short stories for it,
A poet, an editor, a short story writer, a translator and a prose-writer
And above all, an Odia of Odisha, my native land,
The place of his birth and rearing up.

A poet imagistic and photographic, he took poetry
As images and photographs,
Marking the negatives and shadows in lights,
Using the notebooks of light and darkness
Which he taught to physics students.

A poet of faith and doubt is he
And to doubt his skepticism in faith,
Discerning with Western reasoning,
But what it ails him most is the present-day situation,
Rape, murder, domestic violence, dowry deaths, bride burnings, female feticide,
Terrorism, communal harmony, factionalism, loot, rapine, corruption, trafficking,
Hunger, poverty, backwardness and underdevelopment.

Call him whatever you like to,
An imagist, a realist, a mythist, a feminist, a nihilist,
An existentialist, a modernist or a post-modernist,
Whatever have you to call,
You call him,
As he is ever eluding, ever escaping.

A dreamer and a visionary,
A myth-maker and a historiographer,
An imagist with the picturization is he not merely,
Not a lensman merely
But one with a social purpose,
Art for art’s sake not, for morality too,
Poetry with some social purpose
And the images of his dazzle the reader.

A modern poet, it is difficult to fathom him
As meaning is not,
And it is useless to search for it
As he writes not for the meaning sake
But as for imagery sake,
Which is so slippery to pass out of sight.

With the camera hanging from the neck,
He photographs the temples,
The ancient rock-built, stone-hewn temples
Of great architectural splendour,
The Jagannath Puri temple, the Lingaraj temple,
The Udaigiri and Khandagiri caves,
The Dhaulagiri.

A historiographer, he tries to trace out and re-locate
The site of regional history,
A cartographer
He is a map-maker of Odisha,
Its art, culture and tradition.

A poet of serenade and its landscapes,
Relationship, man-woman relationship story,
He dreams of the Kalinga war
Fought between the Ashoka and the Kalinga king,
The battle-fields laced with bloodshed
And the river Daya full of blood,
Which but he has not forgotten them.

A poet of time, he shows everything
As the ed disc of the sun appearing on the horizon
And the retreating sun setting down,
In terms of light and darkness
And it is of course difficult to explain light and darkness,
What things are they made of?

He sees the art and artifacts, the great work of masonary and architecture,
Thinks of the heyday of glory and splendid temple-making,
The sculptures and figurines on the outer walls of the temples
In love and relationship,
Dharma, artha, kama and moksha,
But the toils, tears, troubles and tribulations of the dark daughters
None has come to feel them sociologically,
The fruits of their labour.