Sinbad’s Afterlife Blues: A Poem by Sachin Ketkar

Sinbad’s Afterlife Blues

Sachin Ketkar

Ocean is an old discarded myth.

I hear the leisurely blue songs

Of the whale swimming

Serenely

At the back of my mind

I view her sprout jets of love

As she dives and crashes

I thought she was an island

On which I could live

But she fled.

I have gone down under the waves of sleep

Waters as voluptuous as death

Have engulfed me

When I open my eyes

The world turns its back upon me

They say

She is just a blue apparition

On an inky night

Her songs are the merely moving ridges

Tumbling over one another

Plug your ears they say

Now that I am just a pallid corpse

Floating like a weed under the sea

I will reach out to her

And let her secret songs

Run like silk through my veins

12 August 2010                     12 pm

poetry and me

One of my teachers whom I hold in high esteem once said that he was now no longer interested in the literary approach which analyzes `language of literature or poetry' but he is interested in the `man-behind-the-work'. I disagreed. I felt that this belief is rooted in medieval bhakti notion of the poet as a saint and this attitude meant `saint-mongering' of some form. I felt that it is the special use of language that is important in poetry.

Today I feel both of us are wrong. The poet IS the Work and the Poem IS the poet. If the poem sounds dishonest and superficial, the poet must be the same too.


My poem IS Sachin. The mythical, surreal world on my poems is the world I inhabit: the world I discover, reveal through my writing, in a way.


I used to believe that the poems are not `expressions' of the self but `inventions'.
But today I feel that my poem IS my self itself