Yellowing pages

On those

Brittle

Yellowing pages

Of the brown diary

Discovered in the

Dusty attic,

You come to

 Hear the

Faint rustling

Of the faded

Memories

Preserved and pickled

In the sprawling

Lines composed

With a black pen

By a forgotten grandmother

Sometime in the

20^th Century that is

Now somewhere buried,

Like the

Gentle fluttering

Of the cute

Yellow butterflies

Caught and kept

In a cruel jar

As the

Winged trophies

For others

To see.

On a fasting poet and New Philistinism

---Sunil Sharma
In the Republic, Book X, the distrust of poets and poetry is made explicit by Socrates: He wants both banished from his ideal state. That was done in 360 B.C.E but Plato’s famous ghost still haunts the world even to-day in the second decade of the new millennium. Although ideal republic remains a dream and philosopher-kings could never happen in real, the cynicism persists. In globalised economy dominated by the trans-national capital, New Philistinism rules. All spiritual production is suspect; all use-values are meaningless. Poets are mad. By extension, artistes are dangerous. Modern schizophrenia cites classic cases of Van Gogh, Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf. Suicide of these gifted children of God are romanticized; their pain forgotten by the cruel world in search of myths of mad prophets and misfit poets unable to legislate a commercial world since commerce recognizes material wealth and not radical ideas that can change the status quo.
Not much has altered. A poet and thinker Louis Kastakin of Wakefield, UK, sits on a fast to demand his right to dignity and suitable work. Unemployed in last five years, this excellent versifier is unwanted in the post-Thatcher England. Wordsworth and Dickens predicted this for their dear England and now it is recurring. Hard Times are here again. Utilitarian ideology prohibits poetry. Artists are persona non grata. They must be starved and banished and crucified. And madness and suicide of such tender souls glorified! Milton in 1642 pinned this sonnet on his door as an appeal to the marching King and his army and expected humane treatment from the soldiers:

Sonnet VIII. When The Assault Was Intended To The City
Captain or Colonel, or Knight in Arms,
Whose chance on these defenceless dores may sease,
If ever deed of honour did thee please,
Guard them, and him within protect from harms,
He can requite thee, for he knows the charms
That call Fame on such gentle acts as these,
And he can spred thy Name o're Lands and Seas,
What ever clime the Suns bright circle warms.
Lift not thy spear against the Muses Bowre,
The great Emathian Conqueror bid spare
The house of Pindarus, when Temple and Towre
Went to the ground: And the repeated air
Of sad Electra's Poet had the power
To save th' Athenian Walls from ruine bare.

That shows Milton’s belief in the power of poetry over the forces of war. It is symptomatic of the history of humankind: Poetry and civil society were never in easy alliance. Poetry questions; power hides. The disdain of the elite is clear. Poets are to be starved, ridiculed and ostracized. Nothing has changed vis-à-vis poets and poetry. Louis Kastakin’s long-term unemployment proves that beyond doubt. It is darkest hour for us. An unemployed bard in post-industrial, post-modern society is a greatest moral indictment of a culture that promotes utilitarian credo and bans the liberal arts.
Poets of the world, unite!

Blank

Eyes

Of the

Widowed mother,

Totally

Blank---

Like a

Lonely

Broken

Country- road,

On a summer

Night.

Kiss

A gossamer cloud

Spread out in the

Clear sky

On this crisp morning,

After the heavy rains,

Bends down and

Kisses tenderly

The muscular peak

Of a squat hill in a flooded

Field,

Like a white princess

Delicate and shy,

Lip-locking with

 A sturdy Moor

On the sly,

In an Elizabethan Court!

The Rudra Shiva awakes

Listen,

Homo Economicus,

The rolling drum-beats

 Of the

Lord Shiva;

The Compassionate One,

Is now angry, and

Manifest

In the fierce Rudra form,

The loud drum-beats

Distant, yet so near,

Terrible in sound

Like a

Wounded river

Roaring and pouncing,

The Rudra- Shiva,

In a dance-pose;

His feet slowly

Stamping, and thus

 Dislodging the

Silent rocks,

Cleaving roads and mountains;

 His eyes are red,

In this mini-Tandava Nritya

That shakes the holy terrain;

Terrible reverberations

Of the divine drum

Rock and

Dislodge the top soil,

And produce the slides;

There is death

And destruction

Everywhere;

His fury is finally unleashed,

Divine wrath visits

The sacred grounds,

Because you

Deliberately ignored

His earlier signs;

Listen to the rolling drum,

Now, at least,

And pay heed---

You, the dulled

Homo Economicus,

And do not annoy

The kind God further

By your unrestrained arrogance

And unlimited greed.

 (Occasioned by the recent Uttarakhand disaster of June 16, 2013)