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Hemant Divate 

  • Poem 1: ​Pedru Uncle
    ​
  • Poem 2: ​What happened to language?
    ​​
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Pedru Uncle
​
Pedru Uncle
Every one of your extremities had begun to resist
Your wooden armchair
The ashtray for stubbing your beedis
Your commode
The fluttering pages of your frayed Bible
And the one surviving framed icon of Christ
 
Even now, I can see you
Pulling uneasily on your beedis
Coughing and keening in your armchair
What life was left was hard to take
But even in your piteous state, you could not but
Mope all over your room
No word seemed to leave
Your shaky lips
Even the nicotine exhalations from your mouth
Seemed paralyzed, like you
 
Prayers babbled in your head
There, in front of the framed Christ
Your whole body burbled
A last psalm for yourself, and for us, perhaps
 
You used to ask everyone
What’s up with you?
At the time, I did nothing
But poetry
You used to say
You are mad
But you loved to read my poems
With great interest
You used to say
When I was in college
I used to write poems
But that was because of madness
Poetry makes you weak, my son
The day I left writing
I left worrying about others
And I became the strongest man
 
All your life, you found no one to be with you
All your life, you remained orphaned
No one loved you
 
And now,
The words of the Bible, hardly legible
In the light of a zero watt bulb
You too have faded away
In the thoughts of almost everyone
 
Beyond the rusted bars of your window
You could probably see
Day turn into night
Probably make out what time it was
There was no one you could wait for
And if you did, it would only be to realize
The seasons had changed
Beyond the rusted bars of your window
And when, shedding like a leaf
You found yourself
In your last moments
All alone,
Could you then burble
The last psalm to Jesus
In your head?
 
Uncle
You, who belonged to nobody
Who would you be thinking of?
And if you looked back at your own life
What part of it was worth remembering?
 
Now
When I think of you
I feel
It could be my time to keel over too
But
I’m still hanging on
Because I’m mad, uncle
I still write poems
I’m mad.
What happened to language?
​

What happened to the language?
of the boy sucking on a sugarcane stick.
What happened to his language, this vagabond,
rolling an old tyre all over his village?
What happened to the everyday tongue
of this little boy, playing thabu and marbles?
 
What happened to the language of the child
who loved surparambya, gilli-danda, lagori,
tops, mummy-daddy, doctor-doctor?
 
What happened to this free bird
who lustily blew his whistle during the jatra?
This brawling boy, who played appa-rappi
and cricket with a ball of rags? What happened?
 
The same boy, who spoke with his own friends later,
self-conscious of his obviously ghati tongue.
What happened to his language?
Kaay zhaala?
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Hemant Divate is a poet, editor, publisher and translator. He is the founder-editor of the Marathi little magazine Abhidhanantar, which was published uninterruptedly for 18 years. Abhidhanantar has been credited for providing a solid platform to new poets and for enriching the post-nineties Marathi literary scene. Divate is credited with changing the Marathi literary scene through Abhidhanantar and the Indian English poetry scene through his imprint Poetrywala. He is the author of six poetry collections in Marathi. Divate’s poems have been translated into French, Italian, Slovak, Japanese, Persian, Maltese, Serbian, Turkish, Slovenian, Greek, Galician, Hindi and many Indian languages. In translation, he has a book each in Spanish, Irish, Arabic, German and Estonian apart from four in English. His poems figure in numerous anthologies in Marathi and English. Divate has participated in numerous international poetry and literature festivals across the globe. His publishing house, Paperwall Media & Publishing, has published (under its imprint Poetrywala) more than 100 poetry collections. Hemant lives and works in Mumbai.


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