Rembrandt's Shadow (I came here to tell you)

From the desk of Vitasta

Time: Irrelevant

Notes: Here I've followed a new pattern of  85 lines broken into 5 stanzas of 21, 14, 21, 14, 15 lines respectively. I think I have invented this scheme and I quite like this. I will call this structure 'My REM Scheme'.

EDIT: Rembrandt's Shadow is published in Indian Literature 314, Sahitya Akademi, 2019.

Rembrandt's shadow

runs across my face.

He who died in dry-point

in the focal length of poverty's mirror

and was resurrected from a bed of cold ignominy

and thrust on walls in museums and t-shirt stores in Tokyo.

Celebrated, a prophet of good families and empathy,

seer of humanity languishing, soaked in turpentine

and fancy dress.

Dark faces, horrors frozen in

triangles and diamonds, bags under eyes,

and over application and wine and the evidence of time.

Pink things, in summer cascade

lawns and ruins and the stockyard.

Women, naked and feathered,

the velvet curtains drawn

across their breasts and on their

chins and buttocks to leave out

the details, of petals and wind

and the death of peacocks in winter's

spring mind.

These savages! These ruthless

cunts! These makers of animal sins in

Bosch's impossible gardens, these brooding

print-makers of love and godly

angels that speak of hell and versatility and progress.

Known to the world through first names

and studying elephants and adultery,

and the coming of invasions and the army of art!

What happened in the 1650s in the asylum,

in the secret concubinage of the

whore mother, in death beds and

consumption, that consumed all too

many, that old poet killing disease,

the dream cycle.

Let's form a guild!

And let us wait for the destruction of denominations,

and fresh faced folks of period dramas

from Gorakhpur and from childhood,

plucked in the tender lovesick buds

of pubscent wet dreams and the cultivated tyranny

of war and reservations and the renaissance

and the variable exchange rates of the RBI,

the usurper of hope, the eater of cattle like fat cows and fat civil machines,

servants with a pocket watch and a gunny bag, and a degree in social economy,

coming over in a procession with the secret

society of D.Trump worshipers and boycott salesmen, 

smuggling and blanketing and spending jail time shaking, 

and returning covered in the illumination of 4th century

Indian poetry and mathematics and floral candles and Kashmir,

in lines, and in the flesh trades and on lorries,

screaming into glory blue loudspeakers, 

a massless sea of faces, faces, faces,

noisy, barking, throwing tiffin boxes from

fifty-second storey windows into holy streams

of human history.

I came here today to tell you

that Rembrandt's shadow runs

across my face, and across the vastitude of men,

and across the biscuit factory in Bhandup,

and across the court mandated dietary restrictions

and ayurveda, and over the cigarette smoking, distressed jean wearing 

mall-time hipsters in NOIDA and Bengaluru.

I came here to tell you of the Abduction of Europa,

and the East India Company,

and the Rape of Ganymede.

I came to here tell you that I weep at night,

for my home, and for my people, for my sons and  my mothers

and for the gutters of Mumbai's

busy Streets.

I came here armed with Shelly and Auden, 

and Lou Reed,

I came here in clean syringes and in hairsprays,

through emergency exit doors and in the evening sky.

I came here to tell you that madness exists

and balance, and oblivion and the frigid

silence of truth also exists,

in the shadowy courtyards of reason.

I came here today to tell you,

that I can hear you,

through the etchings and the intimate eyes

in picture frames and in the dusky corners

of space that has no boundaries.

I came here to tell you,

that poetry exists.

*

*

~Peace on Earth~