In Bombay you lived, winning & losing your life;
your eyes longed for the place wherever you went,
the gra** growing between Bombay's pavement tiles.
‘Here lies a poet whose theme was human failure -
you're praised in a dozen noted obituaries indeed!
Having tasted the variety of things, uncertainties,
you have flown to your appointed end, venerating
the rootedness in ‘the liberties of mind, ' fearing
the chase of cash and idlers' knowledge, holding
your own sanity hard ‘against the thieves of time.'
You have fallen into a place whence you can't rise;
your friends & fans will visit the grave where you lie;
it's a time to change, a time to act & contemplate:
alas, without you for thousands of years indeed,
‘The Rose will blossom and the Spring will bloom.'
Horrors are less remote. Like a shipwrecked sailor
you reached ‘the obvious shore beyond the sea; '
the d**h Express trampled you under its wheels.
Black canopies will be thrust upon different skies,
And mere tears will pour down from eye-sockets.
Yes, this planet harbours a stock of wild paradoxes,
‘embrace & be embraced by the silence of the place.'
Whether groping among giant nightmares or not,
everybody's lived in this world to ‘see and be seen, '
after coming out of the prison of his own making.
I myself lounged in an impa**e of my choosing,
too felt ‘there's no harder prison than writing verse.'
Exile made you a citizen of a language of poetry.
Have you gained much in losing what not in life?
Life's a carlicue that still mocks our destinations.
Ezekiel, you're a ‘reluctant creature of a solitude'
whose poems ‘haunt the human night, ' marking
a thousand intricacies of heart & brain well-visited.
You rode your ‘elephant of thought' everywhere;
now my generation riding motorbikes of thought!