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    A Vagrant Mirror
    A Vagrant Mirror
    A Vagrant Mirror
    Ebook136 pages58 minutes

    A Vagrant Mirror

    By Satyapal Anand

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    About this ebook

    Satyapal Anands poetry is cerebral rather than emotional. It reveals a many splendored splash of color and sound. His poems reveal the essential mythopoeic self present in the poet himself, as in all humanity. Again, his personae are all inside his poems. Here and now or there and beyond combine and create word collages. By authenticating the effects of the vision and perceptions underlying them, his images give us new ways of seeing the world. There is a kind of double vision involved in it. His is the imagists faculty for seeing a thing at once precisely for itself and, at the same time, as part of a larger phenomenon. Many of his poems are dramatic monologues. In these the speaker does not speak in a vacuum. When he speaks or acts, it reflects the time, place, thought, social conventions, and general circumstances; but it also impinges upon political, philosophical, and religious shades of meaning that transgress the immediacy of the situation. Caroline Greene says that nothing extraordinary has happened in American poetry in the past half a century, and if an Urdu poet of Satyapal Anands stature chooses to bring his treasure house to the English-speaking word, it is likely to change the entire scenario here. It is precisely because the poet recovers the extracultural, historic-mythological ground of humanity as a whole that American poets have lost in localizing their poetry.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTrafford Publishing
    Release dateDec 2, 2011
    ISBN9781466902312
    A Vagrant Mirror
    Author

    Satyapal Anand

    An octogenarian author, Satyapal Anand (born in 1931) is a well-known Urdu and English poet. He has published forty books in Urdu and no fewer than a dozen in English. Poetry, prose, literary criticism, history, cultural synthesis of the East and the West, and religion, with particular reference to Buddhism, are his chosen subjects. A retired university professor of English, with a distinctive record in the field of comparative literature, Satyapal Anand is an expert in curriculum planning and course designing in this field. As a poet in Urdu, a language spoken and written by more than a billion people of Indo-Pak subcontinent, he is known to have blazed a trail by introducing a modern (read: European) tinge to it. Born in the prepartition of India (an area now in Pakistan), Satyapal Anand has had half a century of teaching career at the university level in diverse universities of India, Saudi Arabia, England, and North America. Having retired from active classroom teaching, he now teaches a couple of online courses but largely keeps himself busy not only in creative writing but also in making trips to address literary seminars in Europe, India, and Pakistan. After the demise of his wife, Satyapal Anand lives all by himself in a quiet neighborhood in Herndon, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, DC.

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      Book preview

      A Vagrant Mirror - Satyapal Anand

      The Prodigal Son Will

      Be Back

      Suddenly, past the midnight hour

      Yes, I will come upon you suddenly

      Taking you unawares

      And you will shrink from me

      Holding up frail arms vainly to fend me off

      But I shall come unassailable

      Having found my identity at last

      Come I must, at least once.

      I have been too long patient

      Too long willing to have you hold me

      Battened under, inert and immobile

      But I am resolved—nay, doubly resolved

      You shall acknowledge me when I come

      And I shall be as merciless as the astounding dawn

      to darkness enveloping the earth.

      I will come back to deny your truths;

      I will beat down your pinnacles of falsehood

      And crumple them into minute reluctant dust

      Beneath my brazen heel.

      Cruel it might seem to you

      For you are the dust I am made of

      An arid, dry, seer and inhospitable soil

      A harsh clime, a fallow famine-stricken land

      That never let me blossom forth

      And scatter my seeds around.

      I shall (I know, I shall!) with no hesitation

      Kill your dear prerogatives, how you will

      They shall be sought out, naked all and ashamed;

      For I will come as a chill wind

      I will force your sanctuary

      And I will terribly blast them.

      O, India, my cruel mother goddess

      I will force your citadel of an unholy temple

      And I will blast it like the savage conquerors of yore

      Who came from lands of barbarian tribes.

      The unremembered abysms I will come from

      may be forgotten later, but not my coming.

      And when I come

      The bleak spiders of the night

      Will suddenly turn into fiery dragons,

      And then you will tremble and be aghast,

      And your limbs will be as water

      And you will not find it in you to disavow

      A prodigal son

      When I come, as I promise

      Back from uncharted lands and seas.

      *

      TILL DEATH DO US APART

      A John Donne epigram

      Poison the winds with fingers; say of the seas

      ‘Soft synonyms of silence’, dare to call

      The Poles ‘dear twins’; build infamous ironies

      As, ‘Nadir and Zenith are identical’

      Sing to the lion, ‘He shall lie with the lamb’;

      Inform the meteor of his tortoise gait;

      Title Homeric thunder ‘An epigram’

      But breathe not LOVE about this whirl of hate

      Fifty years of our life together have been, O my wife

      For ours was interplanetary conjunction

      Neighbors in body, light years apart in our minds

      Swift to resume the intercepted function

      Of orbits, crossings: O parable of the heart

      With the anti-climax and truth of our long life

      An unvarnished untruth, nay, a plain lie!

      Understand, if you can, after your death

      You were all along you, no less

      And I was all along just I, no less either.

      God bless your lonely soul!

      *

      THE PATH AND I

      (Originally written in Urdu)

      When I stop, the path raises itself a bit

      Looks at me and says:

      "Why did you stop? To get rid of me?

      You know, you can’t escape me

      Your feet and I are bound together in a chain"

      And I say: "I walk ahead because

      Far ahead my destination is beckoning."

      The path laughs, a little derisively:

      I’ve been walking with you all the time.

      You’re but a path, I say.

      You are stationery. How can you walk?

      The path stops in the midst of its laughter:

      "All right, friend. Tell me how long have you been walking?

      Ten years? Twenty years?

      Fifty years? Or even more?"

      I say, I don’t know.

      It continues its harangue

      "All right, man! Did you ever stop anywhere?

      And if you did stop

      Didn’t you feel it was the end of the road . . .

      You don’t have to go any farther?"

      And I say, "Well, yes, Sometimes I did feel like that—

      But it was true? Wasn’t it?"

      No, it wasn’t, says the path,

      "I never stopped anywhere

      You see, when you stopped to take a little rest

      I kept walking on and then looked back

      And urged you on.

      I never got tired.

      I am still as fresh as I was at the moment

      I started walking with you!"

      Dejectedly I say, Well, I am tired now.

      The path clasps my feet

      And starts crying like a baby

      No, don’t lose courage, my mate It says

      "Keep on walking. Look, I am with you.

      Aren’t I?

      Both of us will walk step-by-step together!"

      The path and I are still walking!

      *

      WAITING FOR THE MORN

      (Originally written in Urdu)

      I toss and turn on the bed

      I close my eyes, open them and close them again.

      Somewhere, I know, I tell myself, there’s

      The Sleep goddess’s temple ahead; its golden minarets,

      Drunk on the sweet nectar of moonlight,

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