Kisan Sosa

The Last Man on Golgotha

The sweat of your brows

Mingled with the oozing blood

As you carried your cross up the hill.

Via dolorosa still wears a damp ribbon of red.

The specters of the night

Have descended on Golgotha.

Your kin lie swooned in grief,

The faithful have all cast their last, longing looks

And walked away with weary steps.

The thieves utter no sound;

Perhaps they have embarked on their last journey.

Lord, as you lie motionless on the cross,

Your benign eyes still brimming with compassion.

Do you really believe

They knew not what they did?

In Jerusalem, a few lights still flicker,

Stifled sobs still break the eerie silence of the night.

Lord, fear stalks me too..

May I take leave of you?

Thus the last man on Golgotha,

Leaving the son of God helpless in his agony,

Walked away into the night.

Hanging on the tree

Hanging on the tree, a severed head

Frozen on the cracked skull.

The lament of a young sky.

A cry: o my sage!

Palaces with domes kissing the sky,

Verses carved on the walls,

The fire of lust burning in bridal chambers.

Two shadows copulating

Day after day,

The weariness of love-making.

But as a tiny worm creeping in the courtyard

Merely thought of raising its head to look up at the sky.

A whole army of terror pounces on it!

Once a worm standing on one foot

Had the temerity to look up at the sky,

Thud!¹ Its head crashed down like a mango.

And old tree with rotten yellow leaves

Went around weeping over the atrocity.

Is ‘white’ always right here?

Hanging on the tree, a lifeless head,

And a thumb² sprouted from a branch

A sage bites off the thumb!

But the thumb bites me still

And the head swings like a pendulum

While the quiver brims with arrows!

Hanging on the tree, a severed head,

Hanging on the tree, a lifeless head,

Hanging on the tree…

1.Reference to sambooka, the sudra sage killed by Ram.

2.Reference to Eklavya, the young adivasi warrier, potential rival to Arjuna.

These men

These men

Who go on pressing your doorbells,

Shattering the silence of your rooms

With their frightful din;

These men

Who like rusted pins

On moth-eaten files,

Talk in circles

In their laughable

Voices;

These men

Who take one menacing, majestic step forward.

But half before the next,

And left in the lurch, break down…

As they lash you again and again

The whip makes deep marks on their fingers.

How, then, shall they point them at you?

O faces buried between knees!

It is futile to wait for the second coming.

Draw aside me the curtains and look:

These men

Whose furious eyes fly at

The wide open windows’

Their fingers have rotted and they have

Nothing left with them to sell.

On watching the raids on the brothels in Chakla Bazar, Surat. As helpless women were arrested for ‘immoral traffic’ a crowd gathered on the scene and started railing at them.

Dousing the fire in the heart

(Ghazal)

Pray, how shall we let out a whoop of joy

Dousing the fire that rages in the heart?

Pray, how shall the seeds bestow their sprouts of life

On the dark, sullen land that forgot to smile?

The arrogant sky, the dissembling earth;

Pray, whom shall we poor foundlings call our kin?

Pray, what shall stop the towering tidal wave

That lashes the wobbling walls of the mind?

Pray, what nest shall the burning bushes hold?

Pray, what remains for us in the charred bowers?

Pray, from what shores shall the wind bring solace?

Each draught brings the taste of salt in the mouth;

Pray how shall we spit on the cold wind’s face?

How shall; we plunge a knife into the earth’s heart?

At The Crossroads

(Ghazal)

At the crossroads, the caravan comes to a halt;

Turn left for the river, for the desert turn right;

Here I can knit my forlorn dreams in black and white,

Here I can plunge into the night’s bottomless pit,

Here I can swim, or to the remorseless tide submit.

The trail splits; here the century, there the instant.

Turn left for the river, for the desert turn right.

From here I go tripping down the valleys of joy,

From here I plod up the path where unknown sorrows lie.

The now and the forever here their long ways part,

Here my hearth and home, there the peace of the graveyard.

Turn left for the river, for the desert turn right.

Jalsaghar ¹

Caught in the web of your vanity

How can you ever pull yourself together

To look destiny in the face

As it smiles sardonically at you

From the midst of its accusers?

The paths of your ‘virile’ sacrifices

Are still bathed in blood.

Your faithful followers lie dead,

Their heads smashed like coconuts.

Now they will rise up from dead as moths

Into the air polluted by your last breath

Only to die struggling

With the beats of Piyaribai’s thumri.

The tears of your beloved kin

Shall flow once more from the burning candles.

Drawing yourself up with the majesty of a khan sahib.

The notes of what malhar shall you dispatch like arrows

To shatter the chandeliars of your jalsaghar?

Your faithful companions – sorry, stooges!-

And your beloved doting kin,

Born again with new garbs and roles

Will now stick their knives into one another.

How shall you witness their gory end

Putting yourself in place of a horse, a dancer, a wife,a son?

Legends on your life and death

Shall sprout again on this maudlin,childish planet.

Begum Akhtar’s plaintive voice,

Sipping back to its natural contours

From a strident forced masculinity

Shall again move to tears.

Men who lost their virgin woods forever

And the beasts who live in eternal exile from their cities.

Those poor, miserable unlettered peasants-

Who were once your serfs,

Who know nothing about your feudal-bourgeois canons-

Shall wave their angry fists

At your portraits on the walls.

The new garb and role you assume then

Shall not redeem you

From the curse of an erratic memory.

You have to  be born a thousand times

Before you can pull yourself together

To look destiny in the face

As it smiles sardonically at you

From the midst of its accusers.

Jalsaghar..

Amen! Amen!Amen!

1.     On Satyajit Ray’s film, Jalsaghar, the ‘sardonic smile of destiny’ in the poem may be directed as much against the mawkish sentimentality that runs through many of Ray’s films, as against the protagonist of the film, Biswajit Roy, the vainglorious zamindar, who stubbornly refuses to accept the decline of his feudal power.

Kisan Sosa
Kisan Sosa, born 4 April, 1939, is a retired Municipal corporation employee. He is a leading Gujarati poet. His collections of poetry are Anast Surya (1985), Anauras Surya (1981) and Surya Jem Dubi Gayun Harmonium (1992).His ghazals are an important contribution to dalit poetry as he initiated dalit themes in them for the first time. His address: Near Pranami Mandir, Saiyadpura, Surat 395003, Gujarat.