ODE TO BOMBAY:DILIP CHITRE

I had promised you a poem before I died
Diamonds storming out of the blackness of a piano
Piece by piece I fall at my own dead feet
Releasing you like a concerto from my silence
I unfasten your bridges from my insistent bones
Free your railway lines from my desperate veins
Dismantle your crowded tenements and meditating machines
Remove your temples and brothels pinned in my skull

You go out of me in a pure spiral of stars
A funeral progressing towards the end of time
Innumerable petals of flame undress your dark
Continuous stem of growing

I walk out of murders and riots
I fall out of smouldering biographies
I sleep on a bed of burning languages
Sending you up in your essential fire and smoke
Piece by piece at my own feet I fall
Diamonds storm out of a black piano

Once I promised you an epic
And now you have robbed me
You have reduced me to rubble
This concerto ends



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Dilip Chitre is a poet, fiction-writer, playwright, painter and filmmaker. His honours, awards and prizes include the Sahitya AKademi Award. Fellow of The Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, New Delhi, Writer-in-Residence at the Villa Waldberta, Feldafing, Munich, National Emeritus Fellow of the Union Ministry of Human Resource Development, New Delhi, Writer-in-Residence and German Academic Exchange Fellow at the South Asia Institute of the University of Heidelberg, Germany, Prix Special du Jury at the Festival des Trois Continents, Nantes, France , Fellow and Writer-in-Residence at the International Writing Program of the University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa. He lives in Pune and writes in Marathi and English. He is currently the Honorary Editor of the quarterly journal 'New Quest'(Mumbai/Pune,India) and Honorary President of the 'Sontheimer Cultural Association'---a folk heritage foundation in Pune, India.