Poetry

By Mukesh Williams

Subverting Dante

When you reify an immaculate belief,
Or try to improve yourself, become noble,
You are left with little option, but to accept
The grand light shining in the sky or
The great darkness lurking below.

Then, as you follow the paradigm,
You either soar into the limitless skies,
Or sink into the nether world below,
Finding only metaphors of growth or decay,
Wondering if you have succeeded or failed.

Caught in the ebb and flow of
Encrypted geographies, stale imagination,
Foregone conclusions, enervated paradigms,
You invent others, confront them with ideologies,
Slowly suffocate them before they can articulate.

Dante¡Çs world has always been too damn vertical,
Ruthlessly categorizing every scent and stench,
Leading you easily into a cultural darkness
Through mudlarks, toshers, and troglodytes,
Helping you find the congealed evil below.

Since you do the spectacular journey all alone
You feel free, burning like a 6-winged seraph,
Daunting the imagination of poets,
Intimidating the oracular vision of clairvoyants,
Threatening the bodiless immortality of angels.

You transform yourself into a skeptic,
Then gingerly step into Charon¡Çs rickety boat
Accompanied by an emaciated Virgil or a shrunken
Sybil,
Look with chutzpah at the calibrated world below,
To claim a space between Acheron and hell.

You have the audacity to seek the company of
The befuddled heathens, the uncommitted gurus,
The wafflers, the opportunists, the fence sitters,
The perplexed Victorians who saw
More faith in honest doubt than in half the creeds.

Remembering the Dead at Westminster Abbey

Memories in stone,
Imaginative mosaics,
Grand colored glass windows,
Dark arches hiding
The repose of the dead
Emerge from an ancient city.

An intriguing empire
Of mind and matter
That once spread to regions unknown
Is now filled with cenotaphs 
Of writers, poets and kings.

For us desperate colonials
This is the presence of
A fascinating world
We always knew
But had never seen.

The Millennium Genji Monogatari

You wish to find a modern hero,
A general symbol of a nation,
One who can act singly,
Even with mala fide intentions,
Not just a figurative prince
Whom woman love and idolize,
Then you must go to the salary man.

You want him to take the lead,
Force his voluptuous moment
To its logical conclusion,
But then you soon realize that
He has very little leisure and
A whole lot of trepidation
To act upon his feelings.

He neither has amoral prospects,
Nor the expansive freedom
Of a Heian Genji
To believe that every woman
Will comply and will not
Call it sexual harassment,
Or worse, rape. 

He will not be able to pursue
A floating world of ephemeral beauty,
The mono no aware,
With a single-minded selfishness
Nor would he have time for
Noh or maudlin sentiment,
He'll be dazzled by the opulence.

And where will you find a woman
Who, in a moment of unrequited love,
Turns away from her lovers,
Tonsures her head
Becomes a nun?
Where will you find her
Towering above puny men?

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Mukesh Williams is a poet and scholar living in Japan. His poems have appeared in international poetry magazines including The Centrifugal Eye, Plankton, Best Poem and Foliate Oak. He has published Nakasendo and Other Poems from Writers Workshop Calcutta, 2006 and Representing India: Literature, Politics, and Identities from Oxford University Press, 2008. He lives in Tokyo and teaches South Asia and American Studies at Keio University and English at Soka University.