Seshendra Visionary Poet of the Millennium
My Country My People - 1
Moments are not the retinue of time. There is one which
decides the turning point of mankind. I can’t hand over to sighs
that time which stands and beckons me. To hell with the shades
to recline and chew the gum of past.
Remember, the storms do not count for a life which strides
With hills and shifts oceans; the fiercest storms blow off while
Struggles of life flit around like flies.
Look! Drunk on pearls of sweat, the sun grows large
and formidable with millions sickles and hammers of light.
In history where savage winds blow in cantos, I cannot be
Like the braches of trees that remain trembling in the hands
Of unrelenting winds.
Do not query why so restless, ask the ocean why it is restless.
Do not say why so furious; ask the hurricane for the answer. Better
Know that time after all is my paper, upon which I write the
Charter of my dreams for the world, sculpture a colossus of force
Out of man; my will, will shout and break the spine of time, tear off
the horizon and throw a new era on the earth-
It shall confer unrest on man and
Flow like red-hot blood through all the roads of
Our villages and make him into a sea and into a tempestuous storm.
I shall gift that consciousness to my country with my four dimensional poems….
Now, centuries will speak the language, which I learnt in the wombs of forests;
My word will be the legacy to future generations;
my poems, only countries and nations deserve-
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| Mr. N.T. Rama rao, well known film star and honorable chief minister of Andhra pradesh felicitates the poet 1984 |
The earth is a natural museum into which generations of flora and fauna set;
And our children, the wingless birds set, like rays of evening sun-
And sons of new generations rise from new
Wombs and new seeds, with new faces, surrounded
By new orbs of light only to weave new civilizations, for the pages of history,
Which keep bulging, until the axe of time descends on it mercilessly.
Sweat flows as an eternal under-current of history, the sinews of human machine work, to
Make this glittering superstructure remain, constantly creaking like gigantic wooden wheel, never at rest and never fed with grease-
History, the stupid woman, works up her hoary voice in tremulous tones, to narrate the
Epic tales of man from graying reason, men listen to her in all times-
The museum is filled and emptied; crowds pass in, and pass out through the halls, like moving winds restless for an unbounded journey, for peaks unseen, unknown but dreamt of generation after generation by the eyes of trees, animals, Men and molecules: while the drums of armies, governments, judicatures, dictators and demagogues continue sounding their empty fanfares-
O each age hungers for a passion, each age invites the rule of stupid theory, willingly; subjects itself to its sovereignty, while the intellect remains critical, watching and hatching the eggs of a new age-
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My Country My People - 2
Once before the jaws of monstrous cities
Swallowed me
I used to relax my limbs on the golden sands of seaside beaches.
And stretch my gaze beyond the restless
Waves of the blue sea.
I used to bathe in the vague sweetness of fancying the objects and lands, beyond the limits of my visual
experience…is it Rangoon, or Singapore, or Bangkok, or that large chunk of water, that liquid sapphire,
the Pacific, which is my blue dream flying
In the sky, fallen to the ground, having lost its wings, somewhere suddenly.
Seas are punctuations in the sentence of earth
The running civilizations breath rest a while
When commas, colons, and hyphens interfere in their travels.
They are then introduced to the lands of new shores,
with fresh looks and In fresh garments.
Seas are pots of ink, which the earth uses
To write her romances.
Empires, civilizations, scents of knowledge
Are scribblings, which the winds carry from the seas.
Those ancient winds, light the cities, rule the countries.
And , it is the same ink with which the epics
Of man are written. Time swallows the poems
Written by man, for the health of man.
I ate old poems now, and vomited their
Undigested limbs. Now
My hunger is for the new word.
I knit poiems now with the void
Thundering beyond my eyes,
With the blue whispering beyond my seas
With the hights soaring beyond my stars:
With depths in me which my hand
Cannot reach,
With al the material which my
Contemporaries are not familiar with-
Beyond the cities in which I remain
Undigested:
Beyond the forests where my soul hatches
Her yearnings,
Beyond that circular line which binds all
Created things and only the one arc of which is
Visible to human eyes,
And beyond which my third eye, craves to burst:
There waiting for me
My blue, blue sea, lying in wait
For centuries on end..
