Delhiwale: His heap of broken images

Rohini poet Arjit Roy shares unfinished verses, reflecting on life's fragments, echoing TS Eliot's themes of incompleteness and unfulfilled endeavors.

While the sun beats, the dead tree gives no shelter, and the cricket no relief. The world is a heap of broken images.

(HT Photo)

This evocation from poet TS Eliot’s Waste Land can get uncomfortably personal. After all, a substantial chunk of our lives consists of a heap of unfinished fragments. We rarely reach the end of things. Our incomplete endeavours are of many types—a broken New Year resolution, an aborted love affair, or even a thing as banal as the Uber driver cancelling the ride. Here are three of citizen Arjit Roy’s many untitled verses that failed to find their end. This evening, the Rohini-based poet scrolls through his mobile phone, showing the poems he couldn’t complete due to various reasons, despite his best attempts. (Judgmental readers must be gently told that Arijit has already published a book of completed poems! Brave of him to share his incomplete works, instead of the other way round.)

1.

The moon is cut

in two equal halves tonight

It is cut with such exactness

Such quality

Such precision

That I look at the moon and wonder

If a scale was used perhaps

So perfect it indeed seems

That the mind is forced to ask

Was it possible without human touch

Or is it so perfect

Because of its very absence

2.

Why is April

The National Poetry Writing Month

Is it because

No other month had a say

Or

Nothing is more lovely

Than a summer’s day

But not in India though

Then why so

Is April given this status?

I think it’s for the April’s fool

And just to look a bit more cool

For only fools write poetry, that too in English in India

And that too for 30 days

Surely, these chaps didn’t know of life’s other ways

MBA, Civils, NET, SSC, IIT & GATE

Those who aren’t really poets, can leave

You aren’t late

3.

O Amaltas tree

If I touch your lowest flower

Will you also grow into me?