Dilip Chitre Poems

My father travels on the late evening train
Standing among silent commuters in the yellow light
Suburbs slide past his unseeing eyes
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In the light of birds the lunatic wakes from uncountable sleeps
His burning electric wires begin to glow
Birds sing in every forest of flesh and blood
The lunatic's fingers turn into strings in the outer silence
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Like a painting by Velazquez
A woman stands
Alone in the frame
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At midnight in the bakery at the corner
While bread and butter-biscuits are being baked
I remember the Rahman of my childhood
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I had promised you a poem before I died
Diamonds storming out of the blackness of a piano
Piece by piece I fall at my own dead feet
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The house of my childhood stood empty
On a grey hill
All its furniture gone
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I am backing home where you died.
One year later, to find
Changes that mask our surrender
To the inevitability of life.
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A fouled Sun rises from behind the textile mills
As I crawl out of my nightmares and hobble
To the sink. Then I luxuriate in the toilet
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The Czar Peter opened up a window on Europe
From where the bankrupt poets of the future saw
A mysterious navy well-armed with battle-ready poetics
Advancing on Russia.
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Determined to tell lies
People are able only to tell the truth -
Said Rahman
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