Their bells replaced by tins they rattle,the city’s lepers don’t mean to warnbut in your face seek the metal you thinkthey’re worth. For once, for some moments,as I drop my ransom and make my getaway— it’s a street that housed the port’s warehouses once —I hear bells from Surat ringing an evening’s close,the murmur of crowds dispersing,watch the harbour’s torches light up a quayI never stepped on and a grandfather I never met,his eye on his watch, just beginning to knowhow little it takes for a day to be extinguished,how long for bells to make us believe it has gone.
Bells
Adil Jussawalla
Feature Date
- August 13, 2021
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“Bells” from SHORELINES: by Adil Jussawalla.
Published by Poetrywala November 2019.
Copyright © 2019 by Adil Jussawalla.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Poet and critic Adil Jussawalla is one of the most influential personalities in the English Poetry circle in India. He has written two books of poetry, Land’s End in 1962 and Missing Person in 1976. He has edited a seminal anthology of new writing from India in 1974 and co-edited an anthology of Indian prose in English in 1977. He writes a complex poetry – ironic, fragmented, non-linear, formally strenuous – that evokes and indicts a dehumanised, spiritually sterile landscape, ravaged by contradiction, suspended in a perpetual state of catastrophe. His more recent works are The Right Kind of Dog in 2013, Maps for a Mortal Moon: Essays and Entertainment in 2014 and I Dreamt a Horse Fell From the Sky in 2015. He was presented the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2014 for his book of poetry Trying to Say Goodbye.
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