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    Sunset Strands
    Sunset Strands
    Sunset Strands
    Ebook158 pages1 hour

    Sunset Strands

    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. He is an imagist in the sense that his images appeal to all our senses, and we feel that what we read is a poem but what we see is a multidimensional picture. Satyapal Anand excels his fellow contemporary poets insofar as his symbolism is nearer to the collective unconscious mind of the race as a whole. In this mythology, classical literature and multiple dimensions of religious experience play a great part. This book has no fewer than seventy poems. There is no unrelieved romanticism, no unhealthy self-pity, no wallowing in the luxury of grief, but there is experience that gives rise to ideas and feelings and their healthy amalgam. Anands art consists in isolating a single experience as a unit shorn of its dross and outer embellishments and then subject it to a poetic inquiry. For example, two of his poems find photogenic correspondence between progenitive sex in human beings and in flora and fauna, one happening in the bedroom and the other in the garden outside. This privity of reproductive process in such a tender poetic expression is unmatched in poetry. An important package is of trans-creations, or creative translations, of the poets own work in other Eastern languages.

    Satyapal Anand uses poetic devices like alliteration, the parallelism of low tones and slow stroke, or rhymes that are enjambed to escape the suffocating atmosphere of close lines. However, the devices he uses show cerebration, cleverness, and control of the finest order.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTrafford Publishing
    Release dateDec 30, 2011
    ISBN9781466907263
    Sunset Strands
    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

      Sunset Strands - Satyapal Anand

      In a Station of the Metro

      (Ezra Pound wrote a poem with this title – 1911)

      "The apparition of those faces in the crowd

      Petals on a wet black bough."

      O Ezra, it is a century since your time

      Your alter-ego Satyapal is in a metro station

      In Washington D.C., the famed flower town of America.

      Wet indeed are the pavements;

      Black bows of trees are bent with

      Car-exhaust blackened melting snow.

      Unlike London of a century back

      Where you didn’t see black faces

      The apparitions here are almost all black

      Negro, no, black, nada; African-American, yes,

      White ghosts here don’t ride the metro

      They cruise by in silver cars;

      Company-owned limousines

      Liveried chauffeurs drive the worthies

      To and fro their centrally heated offices.

      Ezra, had you been your namesake

      A mere twenty-five centuries ago

      A scribe, prophet and reformer

      Helping the Hebrew nation in ways divers

      You might have, in London of a century since,

      Done the same for your own nation

      Ruled by red-neck roosters of the Empire

      On which the sun never set.

      For the war that was not yet christened

      The World War One was looming large

      On the horizon, if any horizon the empire had.

      Ezra, unlike your alter-ago here today

      You never felt the pain of the subject nations

      Like India with untold wealth of yore

      Where loin-clothed men lived on ten pence a day

      Or South Africa of Apartheid’s shameless fame.

      Ezra, you had much else to do.

      Busy you were yourself with melting metaphors

      Sibilant similes and words warbling on poetic numbers

      No time, no, nothing – you had no inkling

      Of what was happening in India or Africa.

      Your ink was spent in worming word pictures

      Homologous homilies in image clusters

      Satisfied you were with what you did.

      Your alter-ego that I am, Ezra,

      I am a disaffected self, for I was born in India

      The brightest gem in the British crown.

      My ancestors served Queens and Kings,

      Victorias, Edwards and Georges.

      A poet nonetheless I am

      And I see the black apparitions in a metro station

      As people, exploited, imposed upon and drained

      By the progeny of the same European masters

      Your sons and their sons and their sons

      Those who live in America today;

      And in my poems I present them

      ‘Petals at a wet black bough’

      In their true black hues.

      So, forgive me, if you can

      But forgive yourself, you mustn’t.

      *

      The Short Hand of Emotion

      Music is the shorthand of emotion.—Leo Tolstoy.

      A debauch of sounds, said I,

      But worthy of notice if harmony is restored

      Organs and instruments play as friends;

      Not as enemies out to cut each others’ throats.

      True, she said, but do remember

      Music is composed before it is played

      Written in a funny language it is.

      What Mozart said, badly written, would give

      a rancid smell if not a bad taste.

      I write my music as a sow piddles, he had said.

      A sow is a filthy animal—and its piddling?

      Does it ring a sound sweet enough for music?

      No, I said, but a sound is a sound.

      If produced in a symphonic harmony, it’s music.

      You don’t see a sow piddling with your mind’s eye.

      You use your ears, better still if the eyes are shut.

      Ears, ears! She said rather unmusically

      Instruments used sheep’s entrails for strings, you know

      Not for nothing that Shakespeare said

      In Much Ado About Nothing: Is it not strange

      That sheep’s guts should hale souls out of men’s bodies?

      If Addison calls it ‘All of heaven we have below’

      Then sheep’s guts and a sow’s piddling are our heaven.

      The bard contradicted himself so often

      One wonders why he wasn’t knighted.

      He talks about sheep’s guts in one breath

      And then in Twelfth Night calls it the food of love

      Give me excess of it; he says, that surfeiting,

      The appetite may sicken, and so die.

      Pooh! Says my lady love, didn’t you read Caruso,

      Enrico Caruso, you know who said that what you do

      When you shit, singing is the same thing, only up.

      If music is a shitty or a piddling business

      I’ve nothing else to say, my dear.

      *

      Beauty and Geometry

      Euclid, it was, who had looked at beauty bare

      Says ‘Edna St. Vincent Millay

      She a beauty though undressed only in her poems.’

      How’s it the men have always sung praises

      Of beauty—unsung by women, be they poetesses.

      Three centuries before the savior

      Who never uttered a word about female beauty

      This geo-metric measure-happy Greek

      Sized up spread and bounds and borders

      Surfaces and solids – their length or tilt

      Angles and magnitudes – their properties and relations

      On paper with a pencil or a pen.

      Beauty’s skin-deep says one, and goes on to say

      Momentary though in mind, in the flesh

      It becomes immortal; no truth in this, says another,

      For beauty is not everlasting, dust is.

      Ask a toad what is beauty

      The answer if the toad, could it speak in human voice

      Would simply be: a female with two round eyes

      A large flat mouth, a yellow belly and a brown back.

      So there you are, my man, singing of beauty

      Sublime and solemn, ethereal and inspiring.

      Be a toad or a Euclid

      But never a Keats to know what is beauty.

      Shall that be the epitaph of this poem?

      *

      The Great Mother Goddess I See

      I have no mystic threads woven

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