Sahitya Akademi

The Eyes of Bandu Waze

Author(s): Dilip Chitre
Source: Indian Literature, Vol. 53, No. 6 (254) (November/December 2009), pp. 25-26
Published by: Sahitya Akademi
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23348087
Accessed: 25-09-2016 14:18 UTC

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Not Too Late For Eternity

It's the one character in which my script ends

The murderous turn of destiny
Primordial signature
And nameless geometry

That's the one character the seed popped unsprouted

The obscure disease without a form
The Sun and the sunflower

That's the one character that can't be pronounced

Its expanse makes the ground scarce
And yet in that one character reality does not burn
Its own fire not dying till the end.

All the above poems are from As is Where Is: Selected English Poems (1964-2007),
2007 Mumbai: Poetrywala.

The Eyes of Bandu Waze*

Turned cinder in the burning spectrum

Intolerable, even more than a sun-stroke,
Mad, drunk, unkempt,
Dressed impeccably in his dirty rags,
When Bandu Waze lifts up his invisible eyes
And SEES
—The Sun's circle freezes,
The Moon becomes a dribbling eye,
Black, grey, dense trickles go rolling over
The space erected by him.

The Earth becomes a gigantic tear

Burning in the sultry zero
Of Bandu Waze's heart.

His eyes like lost paradisos

Explode into sobs

* Bandu Waze: a painter

Dilip Chitre / 25

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After gulping down those lines going crazy
Then Bandu Waze crosses
The darkness of flesh and blood
Counting their constellations
He goes deeper and deeper
He wants only to snatch back
In a single brushstroke
The seven colours on the other side of death
Then I see his shoulders
Sailing across the waves of the river of death
Vanishing like a sunset
Beyond the waves of human illusion
Disappearing shoulder-blades
Through the red void darkness of blood
Bandu Waze's eyes
Dissolve into themselves
Go to sleep, hypnotized,
A shapeless foetus they grow
In their sleeping retinae
And deliver the truth
Through the hot ashes
While they burn themselves out
On the pyre of the blazing spectrum.

Becoming a white shaft of sunlight

Mad, drunk, unkempt, dressed in rags...
...Not frightened by the collapsing sky
the road mortals walk...
Bandu Waze...
...The eyeball Earth grew to become vast.
Vast in her grief...

The eyeball, O Waze—you—

Are smashed.

Translated from Marathi by the Poet

From Signatures: One Hundred Indian Poets Ed. by K Satchidanandan, 2000, New
Delhi: National Book Trust.

26 / Indian Literature: 254

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