Jayanta's Waiting Poem by Bijay Kant Dubey

Jayanta Mahapatra's waiting is an absurdist waiting,
As the characters keep waiting in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot,
Who is Godot after all,
Why do the tramps wait for?
Similar the case with Jayanta Mahapatra's poems
Dealing with time, wait and futile turn up,
An absurdist
Drawing from existentialism and nihilism
As the space full of vacuum,
Nothing is nowhere
And man alone in the cosmos.

Jayanta Mahapatra is a poet of waiting,
Waiting for uselesslessly
As all our todays and tomorrows have shown it to be,
Who waits for what
And which is what?
Whatever be that, let us begin with Jayanta's Waiting,
A collection of poems
Written against a historical backdrop
Of penetration.

Though the collection appeared from a small press,
It begins with The Morning-I,
Telling of a morning
In the stride and clasp of a sweeper girl
With human excreta
And while on the other, in the second morning poem,
A starkly naked Jain monk calmly walks down
The road determined.
At The Burning Ground, Dusk, Fragments,
A Poem For Mahatma Gandhi, Sky, The Stranger,
Are the poems of a type.

But many of it, dealing with Orissa the land of
His birth and nativity,
More specially Puri and Konark
And there is nothing more to find thematically,
Just personal and private reflections abound,
Those of the physics class and its theories of light.
A Country Festival, Taste For Tomorrow, Bhubaneswar,
Orissa, Konark, Dhaulagiri, The Temple Road, Puri,
Learning To Flow Free In The Chariot Festival At Puri,
Are the Orissa-relating poems.

Published in 1979, Waiting is one in the same tread of
The Mahapatrean poems,
A poet of bewitching silence,
He just sees life in the intricacies of relationships,
Conspiring against
With the fickle mind
Always in a flux,
The moments as bubbles appearing on and vanishing,
Nothing as mementoes or memorabilia to tell of,
Everything but in the dustbin of time
To be cleaned again.