Jayanta's Waiting

Jayanta Mahapatra's waiting is an absurdist waiting, As the characters keep waiting in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Who is Godot after all, Why do the tramps wait for? Similar the case with Jayanta Mahapatra's poems Dealing with time, wait and futile turn up, An absurdist Drawing from existentialism and nihilism As the space full of vacuum, Nothing is nowhere And man alone in the cosmos. Jayanta Mahapatra is a poet of waiting, Waiting for uselesslessly As all our todays and tomorrows have shown it to be, Who waits for what And which is what? Whatever be that, let us begin with Jayanta's Waiting, A collection of poems Written against a historical backdrop Of penetration. Though the collection appeared from a small press, It begins with The Morning-I, Telling of a morning In the stride and clasp of a sweeper girl With human excreta And while on the other, in the second morning poem, A starkly naked Jain monk calmly walks down The road determined. At The Burning Ground, Dusk, Fragments, A Poem For Mahatma Gandhi, Sky, The Stranger, Are the poems of a type. But many of it, dealing with Orissa the land of His birth and nativity, More specially Puri and Konark And there is nothing more to find thematically, Just personal and private reflections abound, Those of the physics class and its theories of light. A Country Festival, Taste For Tomorrow, Bhubaneswar, Orissa, Konark, Dhaulagiri, The Temple Road, Puri, Learning To Flow Free In The Chariot Festival At Puri, Are the Orissa-relating poems. Published in 1979, Waiting is one in the same tread of The Mahapatrean poems, A poet of bewitching silence, He just sees life in the intricacies of relationships, Conspiring against With the fickle mind Always in a flux, The moments as bubbles appearing on and vanishing, Nothing as mementoes or memorabilia to tell of, Everything but in the dustbin of time To be cleaned again.