Poetry Collection

What the Himalaya Said and Other Poems

2021-04-29T00:54:08+00:00

What The Himalaya Said And Other Poems

INTRODUCTION

When Mr. Syed Ameeruddin had requested me to write an Introduction to his book of poems, I felt somewhat hesitant to consent because I am not a poet. But still my affection for and friendship with Mr. Ameeruddin, no less than* my intense love for Indo-Anglian literature have prompted me to undertake this delicate task of writing an introduction.

"The proof of the pudding lies in its taste" is an old adage which is applicable to literature, particularly poetry. Yet, to continue the metaphor, it might be useful to the one who wants to taste the pudding, as well as to the one who has made it, if someone were there to offer a brief and general description of the inviting dish. This is precisely what I try to do in the next few paragraphs, a brief and general description of Mr. Ameeruddin's poetic themes and achievement.

Mr. Ameeruddin tries to grapple with the concept of time in his poem "Value of Timelessness". Time is continuous, "a flow of eternal constancy". The poet considers timelessness as the ultimate reality that man should realise; this recognition on the part of man is urgently called for.

The cycle of human civilisation is embedded in timelessness; so also the great opposites : Harmony and Havoc, Peace and Anarchy, Day and Night. The Philosophical equation is simply stated thus:

" Man clings to life

And life clings to Time

Time clings to Universe

And the Universe rests in Timelessness".

In "What the Himalaya said", the title poem, we get a Himalayan censure and expostulation regarding our "Cursed gifts": Drought, Sterility, fragility — lack of fertility; Discomfori, discontentment — dissatisfaction. "The Poet's eyes roll up in a fine frenzy and catch a glimpse of the Himalayas". "The eternal titanic pillars, which connect the Heaven and the Earth". They are cold and merciless but hortatory. Faith, Hope, Truth and Love have been relegated to a back seat in our modern materialistic civilization. The Himalayas thunder their condemnation and roar their reverberating message :

"............follow the two principles

The Self-Discipline and the Self-Realisation !

Then go back to your own, ancient heritage ......"

Bakti Yoga (the path of Devotion), Jnana Yoga (the path of knowledge), and Karma Yoga (the path of Action) are the final message of the Himalayas to the erring mankind.

In "Dome of Gold", a symbolic poem on life and the world, we are told in a paradoxical style how money mindedness has corroded the human spirit:

" Here life, is......in its lifelessness

Wisdom is......in its ignorance

Awareness is......in its unawareness

Religion is......in its irreligiousness

Because, the world is a dome of Gold

Man and Gold ......and Man's relations

are of Gold".

"Ignorance" is another poem which frankly tells us that "the claim of knowledge in itself is ignorance". It should make us think about the contemporary problem of human relations lacking in mutual understanding despite our progress in several branches of knowledge. This irony, according to Mr. Ameeruddin, is due to th© fact —"the man is unknown".

"To keep pace with the fleeing peace" has always been man's objective inspite of his pre-occupation with manifold activities. The age of Space technology is not an exception. If anything, has become more acute now than ever before, the modern man, "a product of disbelief", craves for the divine darling peace, which is defined by Mr. Ameeruddin as "an ineffable mystical joy". Peace which has been "the quest of all ages and the thirst of all men" is urgently wanted in our age of space.

"Blessings" is a prayer addressed to the Himalayas and other natural manifestations in God's creation. The poet's mood is one of rapture and contentment. The romantic joy that pervades the poem is almost infectious.

The last but one poem in this promising anthology, "Dolls of Clay", is so utterly realistic that one may even notice in it a slightly pessimistic note, for the dividing line between realism and pessimism is always invisibly thin. But the poetic tone is what matters as it determines the general tenor. Viewed in this light, "Dolls of Clay" seems to lay bare the transient, ephemeral and illusory characterof our vain-glorious achievements on the one hand and to exhort us to look beyond the glitter of the Dome of Gold or "The City of Glitter and Glory", on the other.

In the last poem called "Youth of our Time", the poet comes to grip with the contemporary theme of frustration of the young. The poem attempts to describe the restless situation, which in the opinion of the poet, is a sequel to the purposeless existence of the present day young men and women. The heartrending plight of the youth can, however, be ameliorated if, and only if, the younger generation dedicates itself to the ideals of "Bhakti, Jnana and Karma" (that is Devotion, Knowledge and Action). The imagery in the poem throughout reflects the impact of technological civilization on the poet's mind.

Mr. Syed Ameeruddin, as the readers may soon discover for themselves, has certainly got the makings and markings of a major Indo-Anglian poet, firmly rooted in the Indian tradition as evidenced by these poems. The contemporary relevance of his metaphysical, mystical themes is surprisingly striking. His facile and felicitous expression is impressive. The imagery and the symbols, so expertly employed by the poet, need further critical explication in so far as they are characteristic of the Indian ethos.

In my opinion, Mr. Ameeruddin's book of Poems—his maiden effort — not only contains a good deal of promise but also offers a fair measure of fulfilment. May this be the harbinger of many more significant and satisfying contributions of poetry from Mr. Ameeruddin, our young and upcoming Indo-Anglian poet.

Dr. A. V. Krishna Rao

I. T. Campus,

Madras-36.

September 22, 1972.

POEM

WHAT THE

HIMALAYA ... SAID

A deadly drought — A ghostly famine.

Dry whither — Sterile and Stagnant.

A turbulent Storm — A thundering earth-quake.

Fatal floods — human disaster

Dread — Panic — Menace and fury.

Echo's — yells — shouts and Screams

Bewilder — Baffle — Puzzle and embarrass.

Split after split and Rift after Rift.

Train of topsyturvy thoughts, ran in Brisk.

Sun's brilliant rays proved futile

The tranquil dawn turned opaque.

Encircled, enveloped in its own set up

And succumbed contentfully, to the

Above said "Unremedied Malady".

Filth and Dirt, struck poignantly

In the long, deep avenues of pure vision

Dazzling light of the mental screen

Faded dim, lost its spark and gleam.

Dull, Drowsy — indolent and lauguish

Streaming through every nerve of mine.

On the whole, over all

Deserted-ness, a complete despair,

An acute cryptic delirium

A torturing crux......

This is the Prevailing......

Crucial state of mind.

The Himalayas ...! The eternal

Titanic pillars, which connect

The Heaven and the Earth.

The Eternal monarchs of......

One-ness — and immutability.

The embodiment of purity,

Divinity and colossal grandeur.

Sublime, up, above, from a distance,

And from a time — Immemorial

Witnessing and observing

The prevailing state of — mutables.

............One day

I soard up to Himalayas

With my tired eyes, and

Drought stricken empty mind,

I was immediately, thrust 'aback ...

Something like a ray of light

Passed in me — from toe to head,

Stupor I felt, my nerves paralysed ...

And everything in me ... at a standstill.

My eyes fluttered — and the limbs trembled

All of a sudden — my lips started,

Quivering ... in awe and fright.

........Then a voice

Trickled from the depths of my Bosom ...

... Pity ! Pity ! — Shower Mercy ! ...

Compassion! Kind! Bliss! ... and

Bless from this stagnation.

Show the Path, ... The light! ...

The way of salvation ... Salvation !

.........To the great Bewilderment

A thundering Uproar ... flashed !

From it a miraculous resonance

Of Drum beat, a Tandem echoed ...

Next a dazzling light sparkled ...

All over the Peak of Himalaya.

........Then from that

All enveloped — thick — dark clouds

An extra — ordinary ... to say

A mysterious ... Voice Rambled ...

... Poor being ! ... Regret!

No salvation from this riddle !!

Salvation you crave is undeserved !!

No condole ! No condone ! No Remedy !

From the entangled, Trauma and Tribulation!!

Drought, sterility, fragility — Lack of fertility

Discomfort, Discontentment — dissatisfaction ...

Are all the cursed gifts ... to you ... from the

Unknown.

Its your own weakness of the ephemeral glitter

Its the sensuous slumber — and the ignorance

That enslaved you to all — transient and illusion.

Relinquished the path of disciplined Divinity

Deliberately drawn the curtains to the rays of Reality

Believed in Blood ... Passion and Lust.

Broke the Screen of sanctity — love to one another

Heart became empty of spirit, Mind full of Dirt.

Faith, Hope, Truth and Love,

The age old rites, the principles of life

You trounce them off ... at will, and Meyopy

To seek your abode in flesh and Matter.

........From that all enveloped

Thick — dark clouds ... a thousand thunders

Broken, and made the whole atmosphere resound.

No condole ! No condone ! No remedy !

From the entangled Trauma and Tribulation.

Torture ! Suffering ! Torture! Suffering !

Suffering!! Torture !! Torture !! and Suffering ! !

After a while ... all the uproar ...

Fantastic and mysterious ... all vanished.

From it emerged an atmosphere of peace,

and a terrible ... Tranquility — Spread.

From it, rang an enchanting sound of solace ...

Its no doubt the sound of mysterious ... Tandave!

... Its never too late, there is a way

Just to retrospect, repent — take a twist in your way.

Just remember ! and follow the two principles

The self Discipline ! and the self Realisation !

Then go back to your own, ancient heritage ...

Delve deep — turn the page of your own Mystics

With self conscience — firm faith

Abide to the Supreme commands in it.

Then you will be one with ONE' ... amidst Bliss!

... After a while ... again

The same — frightening — all enveloped — Thick

And dark clouds ... spread over the Himalayas.

Again ... Mysterious — Unheard — Unimaginable ...

Innumerable sounds of Distraction ... Broke out.

From that ... a deadly thunder bolt flashed ...

It roared ... roared ... roared ... thrice ...

Each uproar ... Conveying a Supreme sense ...

Thrice it resounded ... with significant Meaning ... ...

BH ... K ... TI ... YO ... GAP !!

... GNA ... NA ... YO ... GA!! .

.. KA ... R ... MA ... YO ... GA!!

( BooK Describtion : What the Himalaya Said and other Poems - Published by -Kalaivendhan Publication - Chennai. in 1972 - Total 9 Poem in 46 Pages )

The Dreadful Doom to come and other Poems

2021-04-29T00:52:10+00:00

The Dreadful Doom to come and other Poems

INTRODUCTION

Shri Syed Ameeruddin is already known to readers of Indo - Anglian poetry through his first collection of poems. This is a second collection — 1 The Dreadful Doom to Come...* It contains six poems which are fairly long and which would probably have been called ' Odes' by poets of another generation.

Shri Syed Ameeruddin has a sensitive, poetic heart. He has tasted the waters of disenchantment. The life that he sees around him, with all its faith and evil, makes him resentful. The masculinity of modern woman he strongly disapproves even at the risk of being called a conservative. Technology, With all its attendant ugliness and permissiveness, has but multiplied our material desires and turned the vices of yesterday into Virtues of today.

Intense brooding of this kind makes Shri Syed Ameeruddin wonder what life is. He says that it is

"A never - ending topsy - turvy song.'* It is a continuous tilting tale, a hypnotising, sweet and sad saga that mesmerises ignorant mankind.

But he has his moments of Visions and philosophic perception. He holds that with a divine Jolt, life's earthly Journey enters the supreme stage of Reality. Similarly, every object of beauty finally leads us to the unperceived, supreme Reality, He has also the faith that the great prophets and avatars come down to save erring mankind from doom and destruction If we do not improve our ways,

"In order to clear the debris And to establish peace and dharma, A new divine dignitary Is sure to Come."

The sensitivity of Shri Syed Ameeruddin is geared to a real and metaphysical quest and he has emerged from it with the repose, if not the joy, of faith. The expression of this quest, anguish and repose moves us and touches our hearts.

A sensitive poet, Shri Syed Ameeruddin is experimenting with the diction which will communicate his Vision. He Comes out with sharp and Scintillating lines, with a facile and felicitous expression, which is quite impressive. His poetic craftsmanship will surely come into its own in good time.

I wish him every success in his creative endeavour.

VINAYAK KRISHNA GOKAK

Brindavan, white field Bangalore,

POEM

The Dreadful Doom to Com

Dull minds and dull bodies

With hollow hearts and muddy brains

Sleepy eyes and benumbed limbs

Spiritless souls and languid movements.

Hugged in passion

Embraced in emotion

Asleep in intoxication

Folded in filth and fantasy

Enveloped in sex and sensousness

This is the state of life

Of modern Man...

Sans Mercy, sans Love,

Sans faith, sans Meaning .....

Curruption and Pollution,

Filth and Dirt

Mess and Mire

Buzz and Bewilderment

Fuss and fantastic

Crux and chaos

Thus a great delirium.

Man's so called knowledge

Is his supreme ignorance,

It is magnificient mortification

And a mesmerising Maya.

In this state of ignorance

Amidst this mesmerising Maya

With the help of his colourful thinking

Man is making a dazzling Dome of Gold.

Where sense and self

Are heaped well.

Where ghostly shapes

And superficialities dwell

In his vain achievements

Of science and Technology,

In his futile persuasions

Of progress and prosperity,

Man has harmed humanity

To a very dreadful destiny.

This dull and drowsy Man of to-day

Has really removed the Humanness from Humanity

And transformed Man again to a Beast

To his original position of passion and Barbarism.

Man of to-day is everything, minus being.

He has all grandeur and glory, minus grace.

His heart replete with feeling, minus love.

His mind filled with fantastic thoughts, minus

peace.

Man of today has ignored

All that is eternal

All that is divine.

He has shattered

The mansion of virtue

Of the mystic path

Between Creation and the Creator.

That divine path

Which has its origin

From the very origin

Of Man and world...Adam.

From time immemorial

Prophets and Mystics

Seers and Sages

With a struggle unimaginable

With a power renarkable

With a mission mysterious

With a zeal indefatigable

With a decision irrevocable

With their serene personalities.

And with flames of restlessness

Thty tome amidst this

Turbulent, passion stricken,

Fastidious and impulsive

World of beasts

With human forms.

With traumatic movements

With their chambers of heart and Mind

Benumbed, cl sed and Sealed

These divine personalities

Heavenly ambassodors

Moulders of spirit and Soul

Builders of Harmony and peace

Integrators of Beastly and Angelic

Awal filers of slumbering Sinners

Reckoners of virtue and vice

Breakers of Maya and Illusion

Redeemers of sense and sensuality

Harbingers of Light and knowledge

Guides of Godly and immortality.

These divine messengers

Heavenly communicators

So called prophets

Mystics and Avatars

Sages and Seers

In their timely turns

In various corners

Of this panic-stricken world

In different Yugas and Ages

In different races and languages

Have come with a divine will

And with a Heavenly Sanction

To Shatter the shiniilg sins

To clear the filth and dirt

from the human brain

To curb the deeds of flesh and blood

To make an end to self and passion

To eradicate evil and vice

To open the sealed chambers

Of Mind and heart

To let the divine light pass

Into the dark slumbering souls

To inculcate in the hollow hearts

The sense of realization and the spirit of repentence

To make the spirtless souls

Responsive to the spirit divine.

To inject in the sterile lives....

The qualities of faith, love and kindness

To stir and make active

The dull minds and the dull brains

To lead a right path

To live a life Divine

Adhering to the eternal principles

Of Bhakti,.,Karma...and Gnana.

Thus they remove ignorance from the erring masses

And emencipate Mankind from the evil of Adharma

They rejuvinate the right spirit,...

And resurrect the decayed ages.

By chiselling and chastening the same images

To establish Sanity...Peace...and Dharma

The Very aspiration of divine

In creating these stirring souis

In enveloping this restless eosmos

Is to establish the principles of Eternity

To maintain everlasting peace and tranquillitv

And to sustain the glory of divinity.

From age to age

In different races and ranges

Whenever the glory of divine faded...

And the real righteousness jaded...

Whenever the divine will and the divine path is

shattered

These divine deliverers

Have jumped into the lusty flames of fires

And rushed into ... fallacious fuss...

And dived into that hellish atmosphere

To crush and clash the evil and the insanity

And to drive out the hostile spirit of divinity

In order to revive fertility and the law of Eternity.

From Adam onwards

A chain of prophets came

With a vision and a mission

Whenever the divine law became broken

Noah... David.. Jacob...

Ismail...Moses... Abraham...

Buddha.. .Christ ...Krishna...

And last of all...Mohammed...

Noah, David, Jacob and Abraham

All encountered the tribulations of their time

And crushed the evil—the satonic shame

And established the divine truth in their time.

Moses came

To erroneous Egypt

At a time

When extermities had grown strange

When adharma was dancing at its rage

In the cruel hands of "Firvone"—the rake

Who has diverted the masses From the path of virtue and godliness

To the demeaning direction of passion and sensuousness

Moses visualised his divine mission

On the peaks of* Mount Toor'

And received his divine commandments

To dispel the dark and the evil

And to establish the eternal truth

Of divine glory...and the path of Dharma....

Buddha came At a time

When illusion was in power

Where show and false practices had become a game

In the hands of a few ingenious men Who led

The ignorant masses into bewilderment.

Buddha was enlightened

Under the 'Bodhi Tree' And received

His divine mission of Nirvana

To eradicate sin and suffering

And to illuminate the confused masses

Towards the path of peace and Dharma.

Jesus came

With the same old mission

Of love and path divine

At a time

When hatred and malice prevailed

When lust and lawlessness overflowed

When the fundamental conduct was shattered.

Christ started

His divine mission of sermonising

To inculcate love and Mercy in harsh hearts

In clashing

With the evil and sin

He embraced Suffering

And welcomed the crucifixion

To demonstrate the eternal truth

And to establish The path of peace and Dharma.

Krishna came

To make the vicious forces tame At a time

When vice was dominating virtue

When chaos and anarchy prevailed.

Krishna thundered

His magnificient message

Amidst

The stormy battle of ' Kurukshetra'

To eradicate the evil

And to crush the crimes.

He emphatically echoed

The supreme principle of Karma

The eternal truth—' Nishkama Karrra '

To wipe out the dreadful Adharma

And to establish The divine path of Dharma.

Mohammed came

As the last prophet

With the same mission

To glorify the divine 'Oneness'

And to submit to the wil of Eternity.

Rahamatul-lil-Alamin

Came at a time

When chaos and confusion

Lust and licentiousness

Passion and pollution

And an utter disregard

For everything decent and divine

Was the fashion of the day.

In that barbaric atmosphere

Mohammed fought a lone battle

And voiced the principles of Eternity

To root out the deadly Adharma.

And to make the devilish masses

Realize the divine glory

The eternal principles of Truth.

The path of Submission to the divinity

And the Glorious path of peace,

To establish

The eternal principles

Of conduct, co-existence and Dharma

Thus it is a circling wheel

A continuous process...

It is the deliberate will of the Divine

That peace and harmony should prevail

In this rambling and restless Universe...

Chain of prophets and Seers

Has followed...one after the other...

With the same mission...

And with the same divine vision...

To warn of utter destruction and the doom to come

To glorify the divine austerity

To inculcate the principles of Eternity

And to establish peace and Dharma...

Whenever humanity has gone astray from the path Divine

Whenever human civilisations Reached the peak of Extremity...

History is crystal clear

With evidence in abundance

How civilisations have come and gone

How Man is his own enemy

How his proud claims of progressiveness

Have at last led him down to his catastrophe...

What happened to that stupendous glory of Man

The ancient Nile... and Mabenjadaro...

The great Greeks... and the Roman Grandeur...

To what a disastrous doom they were destined...

Is a monumental reminder...

To the ever soaring

And all bewitching civilisation of To-day...

Of its frightful fate...

And its dreadful doom to come...

It is high time

That dull, drowsy and beastly Man of today

Must get from his sensuous slumber

And derive a lesson from his past...

And immediately revive

His entire activities of filth, flesh and fiction

And must go back to these divine messengers

With awe and reverance to their commandments

This is the only solution

To the present confusion

This is the only avenue

To experience again

That long forgotten...

Love...Peace and faith

Otherwise

A disastrous-destruction is sure to come....

........................................

If so

In order to clear the debris

And to establish peace and Dharma

A new divine dignitary...is sure to come....

( Description of Book - The Deadful Doom to Come - Published by Shiri Surabhi Printers - Chennai - Six Poems in 40 Pages)

A Lover And A Wanderer

2021-04-29T00:49:58+00:00

A Lover And A Wanderer

SYED AMEERUDDIN'S POETRY

Sri Aurobindo visioned future poetry' as mystical and meaningful. To Sarojini Naidu, poetry is orchestration of senses. But poets of Seventies act as a bridge between tradition and dream worlds of surrealism. They hear dark voices silent to others. Their lyrics sweep into the sun. Passion and vehemence leap in waves of rhetoric, twistings of the phrases, paradoxes and ingenuities. They are poems of reality— not realism: of sentiment—not sentimentality. Their restraint of emotions is often judged as cold, abstract, intellectual—often very difficult. These poets speak in images.

There are frequent dialogues between poet and the world. The poet is caught up in something that infinitely surpasses him. There is an awareness of the presence of things in space and the present moment in time. Past and future are ideas: only the present is real.

Jorge Guillen's 'Beyond' is an excellent exposi" tion of this precept;

"Ail things, the millennial

Sum of our being, packed

Into the web of a minute

Eternally here, and my own.

As over the instant

That ranges in ceaseless succession

I pass through eternity's tension

To salvage the present.

The blood races on; if flows

With a fatal avidity.

A destiny blindly assembles.

Itself: I will that I be.

To be—only that I It suffices

For pure delectation !

Thus, in a kinship of silence

To be one with the essences I'"

The whole of Ameeruddin's poems is an ascension towards love. The poet attains through love the fullness of reality. Love yields him its greatest treasure. The act of love surges and resurges. He traces the passionate multi-facets of love and presents in very evocative way the process and evolution of love from the ideal and platonic to the pragmatic and surrealistic trends of our time:

''Gypsy river runs through my bones.

This road where you and I stand

Leads back to a barren land

We have left far behind......

Let us part, I must wander.

Do not follow me.

Let the love

in your eyes

blossom

into secret

constellations."

Ameeruddin is a realist of the senses. The two realities, the earth and the soul, are firm in his own. The winding galleries of his mind unfurl strange tunes. There is verbal magic in his verses. Green echoes haunt him like a passion. He feels poetry like fire in his hands. He replaces meanings by suggestions. Unsuspected impulses and unfathomable fears throb and explode.

Nature to him is a merciless genetic force which transmits to its creatures its own frenzied fury. Man-nature's favorite offering—mirrors its riotous cruelty. Love is stripped of its sentimental wrappings and reduced to the starkness of its violent rapture.

Like Lorca, Ameeruddin hungers for static inward illumination:

"Love is awakened in the greyness of its rhythm.

Our interior sky contains a triumph of blood.

But all our optimism

turns to sorrow.

To contemplate

the dead drops on the glass

And these drops

are eyes of the infinite; gazing

Back into the white infinity

which is their parent.

Each drop of water

trembles on the dim glass

Leaving divine

wounds of diamond.

They are poets of water

who have seen and meditate

Things which the vast crowds of rivers ignore."

(Lorca in Lluvia')

There is sheer imagistic delicacy as in "Reminiscences:"

"we sit together

holding each pulsating rhythm

in cascaded heart

and eloquent in dumb deeds

We felt the creep

of velvety longings

and eternity captured

in mute mellow mystic night"

and as in ' Love Strings :"

"Yet another night

I gazed and gazed

on your rippling smiles

and diving through

your spectroscopic eyes

saw the hidden spectrum

of soul's solace

in the dewy dusk in you."

Ameeruddin is restless of the waltzing civilisation. He lays bare the agony in the inner recesses of his soul. His poetry is lyrical and subjective: has the stamp of his unique personality — a slenderness, a nervous subtlety which makes him the finest and the most sensitive of our contemporary poets. In his "A Warning," he cries:

What happened

to that stupendous glory of man ?

The ancient Nile...

and Mahenjadaro... The great Greeks...

and the Roman grandeur... To what disastrous doom

they were destined.

Is a monumental reminder

To the ever soaring And all bewildering

civilisation of Today...

of its frightful fate

and its

Dreadful Doom To Come..."

Here is a poem fit to adorn the airports of all warring nations.

Will humans pause and listen ?

Future is ephemeral, a mirage, a wheel coming to a circle.

KRISHNA SRINIVAS

1—12-1980

POEM

A LOVER AND A WANDERER -

PART I

You came to me that way, a stranger,

We travelled together transparently,

A cascade—your heart singing, your lips longing.

Then, I felt

Your radiant eyes meeting mine,

Oh I what's all, a challenge, an acceptance;

You call it love or no love,

I consider it a moment alive

Craving for the secret oneness

Of our buzzing bodies.

That evening, I filled my hands

With the darkness of your long tresses

And whispered into your ears;

"Do not search for love

In the savage wilderness of the heart.

Let us simply share

The passion of the twilight:

And I shall touch the dizzy dark zenith

With your thundering thighs:

When the violence is over

I will explore the

Simmering silence of the seas

And shores beyond.

That midnight.

We perched in a twilighty bower

To experience a purple paradise.

The night light burned, and we slept

Keeping the love we had stored inside.

We undressed in silent submission

Into the rippling force of the whirlwind.

Frantically, I drew

Your body to my hairy chest:

You with your amorous hisses

Anchored my waving waist and

Started caressing the secret

Fibres of my frame

And flooding rivers ran through us

To meet at a calm confluence.

All that night,

Our mouths exchanged breath

Of smoky fragrance. Thus

Mute modulations cut across

The tangled hurricane bodies

Till our lusty cyclone was

Reduced to a dumb quititude.

The hectic and gentler love-time over,

My fingers cried for your fingers

My arms held you again, we clung

To each other through the void of night

No words, no regrets, no wonder,

only the syllables of silence

Crisscrossing inbetween us:

Its' only from passion love springs,

Life is to live and to experience;

A moment alive is a paradise

Better than a life strings attached

And passions smothered.

I and you, we are alone.

Loneness, lust and agony—the reality

Only memories like our shadows haunt,

If passions diffuse a few

The same passions give rise to new ones.

The night grew transparent

The delirium of the flesh ached:

Therefore, dear, let us part

As lovers and strangers.

Love is what we felt and shared

In that timeless moment of passion.

Let us part ...

I listen to the stealthy footsteps

Of the chasing sun at dawn,

I must rush. Journey is long ...

It's time for me to go...

Goodbye dear, goodbye !

Someday, we shall meet as strangers

With rivers on our shoulders

On a wild torrent night

To resurrect our love

With the brutal anonymity

Of grief and acquaintance.

Goodbye! Goodbye I

Carefree into the winding ways

Unbounded, I must walk

A head start for tomorrow

Leaving the reminiscence of past

Where I am, and tread

Forward in the exilirating future.

A wild winding path. Journey is long,

I must wander, I must wander:

There is storm in my lone soul

And the whirly waves are calling.

PART - II

We met once again

Reconciling our differences, as strangers,

With encased thoughts and renewed desires,

We encirled in each others arms

To steal the colours from the rainbow,

To crush the lilting moon inbetween us

In the still of night rhythms rocked,

We closed our eyes. Our hands discovered

All the secrets of our body.

All around us the passions swirlad.

With rivers of wild scream

In our violent blood,

We captured and crushed

The raging storm, which

Flashed through our whirly bodies.

Thus that night, the sea is caught

In our juicy whispers of oneness ...

You came upon me

in that fleeting light, when

1 was chasing the fugitive moon

With flooding rivers on your palms

To hold me in the hurricane of passions.

Like a gypsy, I stood inside

The rainscape, muttering your name

With the melody of muteness.

Your eyes radiated lightning.

The cyclone centred in your dark tresses

As you embraced me with your

Snaky wriggles, I became more and more

Aware of my loneness, a man alone ...

Now, I watch my loneness

Growing in the vast sky.

And the darkness inherits my silence*

I know, you feel perturbed

At my cataclysmic despair.

But dear listen

Wherever I go I feel that

I cannot escape myself.

When night falls.

Your sweet whispers haunt me:

I love you. Love me again

Even without love'. My tongue

Longs for your tongue, and suddenly

In my thoughts, you surround me

With the snakes in your embrace.

But this is just a

Torrential tension in my mind,

A momentary criss-cross.

Which fades away, when

The real quest of my spirit

And my lone song comes to the fore...

Therefore dear,

Let us meet as strangers,

And pretend for a moment

You are mine and I am yours,

In this wild torrent night

To resurrect and rejuvenate our love

With the brutal anonymity

Of grief and acquaintance,

Let us remake end rebuild

The moment of purple paradise

and to relive a moment alive.

Dear as you know,

My target is the fugitive moon.

A carefree wanderer.

The dark and deep woods are beckoning.

A wild winding path, I have to cross

To experience and explore

The labyrinthine webs of humanity.

Dear, in your eyes

I watched my shattered dreams

Grow in the purple twilight:

I grew up in the town.

Went through the mill of rituals.

Temperamentally an artist

Frank and loved to be free.

But, I was made an onion,

By putting on my spirit

Layer after layer of all

Shams of religion, creed

and artificialities of hollow living.

My artistic quest rebelled,

Wandered from place to place

To discover my true self.

The reality of life by

Shattering the web of hypocrisy.

Came to a city, settled as

A teacher, poet; enjoyed the

Pleasures and pangs of being

A lover, husband, father, friend and foe.

The closer I got to forty, more

I am disillusioned and more

I became aware of my loneness,

Anguish and passion. The rest

Is an eye-wash — a perfect sham.

I have wandered all the lonely woods

And watched the lonesome fractured cities at sunset.

I spoke to every tired passerby

In my ways and shared strange secrets.

There is emptiness and show everywhere.

I found only my loneness and my encounter,

Through this glittering contours,

whispered in me the reality beyond bounds.

My vagabond satchel replete

With all my sorrows This sadeyed night

Lingers all my lilting moon breaking songs.

Dear, let us pretend as strangers.

I am like nobody since you loved me.

And I am the nowhereman.

Gypsy river runs through my bones.

This road where you and I stand

Leads back to barren land

We have left far behind ...

Let us part, I must wander.

Do not follow me. Let the love in your

Eyes blossom into secret constellations.

Dear, let there be smile on your lips.

Let your whispers create the new music of love.

I have the compassion of the storms.

For me loving and unloving are one.

Like the sea rips the sea gulls apart,

Let us part. Journey is long. I have to go.

The bewildered hurricane bangs upon the door.

The wind breaks into splinters of glass.

The eye of the storm has centred in my head.

I must go ! Irresistible is the call !

Let us caress each other like cats do

And part. Journey is long. I must go.

I have decided to shun the abocryphal alibi.

I made my confession to be alone.

You may come in my restless dreams

With the secret temptations of your lust.

But its all a word written with smoke.

Me and my mind blasting loneness remains.

My encounter with men and matter

Has to evolve its own code of

Happiness, do's and don'ts ...

My experience, my commitment

In the human interaction

Must make me discover

My true self and true identity

To find harmony with my inner and outer self.

Therefore dear, let us part.

Now that the passion is quenched.

River in you is emptied.

Preserve the moment alive.

Someday, we shall meet as strangers

To revive end resurrect

Our purple paradise.

Goodbye ! Goodbye !

Let us part. I must wander...

There are some more lone song forests

I must explore.

Some more tried cities I must wander.

Many more eager women

Who enchant me, I have to scale.

Some more seeds of adventure I have to sow.

I have to witness drama in each man's life.

And wipe the tears from every deserving eye.

I long to live, to chide and challenge.

I am a wanderer, winding is the path.

Journey is long. Sea is calling.

The cycolone is going to slash.

Dusky twilight has set on your blurred brows.

Goodbye! Goodbye!

I am the nowhere man, let me travel lonely.

Long is the journey. I must wander.

Dark are the woods. It's time for me to go ...

PART III

In the summer of tender love times

When I stood inside the seascape,

Mocking at the blue light of the fugitive moon,

I felt the leachy creeps

On my wet feet, and watched your

Fevered eyes in the growing lusty twilight.

All around me.

My sunken secret passions

Swirled afresh in reinforced Vigour.

My loneliness damped with springlude.

I swung langorously in between

The state of sleep and wakefulness,

Like a sperm spattering, m

Tantalisingly twisty snake.

Memories never fade. Stormy recoil. A recall ...

I know. I told you :

'Dear, let us pretend as strangers.

I am like nobody, since you loved me.

And I am the nowhere man.

Gypsy livers run through my bones".

Leaves lie faded on this withered woodenscape.

Scissoring silence transcends the opaque sky.

The wild birds turn dumb.

I watch my loneliness growing in the distant sky.

Only mute hurricane vibrations

Hurl a simmering slash in my inner self...

This fatigued evening is fractured

By the storm of reminiscence.

And stirred the wild wastes of my memory ...

A nectar spring swirls,

A twilighty tapestry of pain and Joy:

Let us part I must wander.

Do not follow me. Let the love in your

Eyes blossom into secret constellations.

Someday, we shall meet as strangers.

Dear as you know,

My target is the fugitive moon.

A carefree wanderer.

A wild winding path,

I have to cross

To experience and explore

The labyrinthine webs of humanity.'

A lone ranger, since then ...

I wandered enough the lonely woods

And watched enough

The deformed and decayed cities at sun set.

I also experienced the horror of opaque living.

Mute minute boredoms of the modern life.

And mind blowing,

Hollow stoicisms of the fractured souls.

This gypsy wanders,

Through this wild hawkish lone woods

And dazzling conflegrate cities have taught:

'Everything hinges on a lie, a fragile illusion'.

Further, I have encountered,

In this snaky path of fire-flies :

People with vague longings of flight,

With leaky souls, a split existence,

With the vanity of Himalayan wishes.

And with the twisted rage of a ganges in spate.

Yet, I have observed:

People grieve for the glorious past.

Without understanding the essence.

tn the vain reminiscence of obsolete past,

People lose track of the present, the current flood.

The vibrating real life: which

Results in despair, darkness and deception ..

Unless, people trample upon the decomposed past

They cannot experience the realms of the present.

Otherwise,

Everything hinges on a lie, a fragile illusion.

A wishy-washy world of sham.

A horrified herd of hoax.

On the whole a life without life.

A mute raphsody.

That is; a life on lies ...

Which deceptively deepens the despair

Of a simple people, unable

To cope with themselves.

Thus, the whole life appears

To be a big - 'RIDDLE', a big - *LIE ...

Because:

Lies are the smoke - screen of civilisation ...

Now there is desperate silence in my eyes.

My vagabond satchel is empty with its lonesongs.

Tired of lone ventures with their illusions and lies.

Your memories run like rivers in my body

With a desperate sun of longing in my bones.

Though too late, better than never ...

Now I realise our whispers of oneness,

The love we shared in lyric splendour,

The purple paradise we built,

Meaning of 'Forever' and truth you gave,

After scaling the wild winding path and

Exploring the strange secrets of

All the lonesome cities ...

Dear ! Is it possible to meet once again

As lovers, as strangers, reconciling our differences:

I know you have forgotten me.

That is not your fault: I had

Asked you not to follow me, in my

Youthful zest and unriped quest...

Now my loneness haunts me

Like a devilish shadow.

I need ycu and your balmy company

To wander this wild winding path,

I require your silvery splendour

And rainbow passion, in my

Mission to wipe the tears and to face

The world of sham and life of lies.

Behind evey man's myopic mask ...

In order to chide, activise and challenge;

And turn the course of the age old current

On the basis of mutual encounter and experience.

I am a wanderer. A lone ranger.

I am the nowhere man. No doubt I

But I am vexed and lost my course

With my lone and lousy adventures ...

Dear, long is the Journey, winding is the path.

Where are you ? How are you ?

Whole celestial canopy, whizzes the symphony of

cemetery.

Only the mocking fugitive moon must tell you

my plight ...

I am a wanderer. I have a goal. A purple purpose;

Dear I need you! Dear I need you !

Dark are the woods.

Long is the Journey.

But dear, you be my beacon light...

( Book Description - A Lover And A Wanderer - Published by -POETS PRESS INDIA - Chennai in 1980 - 19 Poems in 50 Pages )

Pettalic Love Times

2021-04-29T00:47:49+00:00

Pettalic Love Times

SYED AMEERUDDIN'S POETRY

As Beatrice haunted Dante like a passion, Ameeruddin is obsessed with the thoughts of his beloved.

His is a repository of scuttled truths and a museum of irrefutable facts-refuted not by empirical discoveries, but by mysterious decisions to experience differently from time to time. It worked in the totems and taboos of ancients, the pyramids of Egypt, the cosmology of Dante, and the theory of expanding universe. Echoes from abyss abound.

At heart, all poetry is memory and celebration. Its joy is not mere pleasure, its lamentation not mere weeping, and its despair not mere despondency. It is concerned with the stature of things—a discovery, a colonisation of inwardness. It begins in the vitality of adventures and ends in display of exploding images.

Ameeruddin dives into the darkness of thoughts, in unbidden suggestions, in multitudinous waves and currents all at once flashing and rushing in dreams. He glimpses great tides in the clairvoyance of passion and in the nightly rising of the somnambulist. He communes with dark powers—as Poe, Kierkegard, Rimbaud and Von Gogh-raging beneath tranquil everydayness. Such visitations come only to masters of verses.

The poet has inexhaustible flow of raging vitality. It is difficult to decipher his goal. Words fall with the impact of a blow with utmost precision. His phrases are weighty. Thousand shafts burn.

Innate eroticism can never be overcome completely. Stephen Spender translating Lorca*s "Faithless Wife*' scales several peaks:

"1 touched her sleeping breads

and they opened to me completely.

The starch of her petticoat Sounded in My ears

Tike a piece of silk slashed by ten knives

....... .......... .........

I took off my tie.

she took off her dress ....

her skin so fine nor do moonlit crystals shine

with such brilliance.

Her thighs escaped me like two fishes surprised...."

Ameeruddin surpasses Lorca in ifriagistic delicacy as ifl "Reminiscences"—"

'They met

when dtisk licked the rubicund eve

unique passioned halvesunned

close and closer

limbs wdded

they rolled over shores

dark with stars ..."

Dr. Mohamed Yasin, hailing Syed*s achievements, say, the poet has tasted and experienced love in different moods and situations and has successfully envisioned the sensual impressions in some of his best known pieces. Usually the treatment of love reverberates with echoes of romantic pathos, but something beyotid mere sensuous gratification* also haunts him.

Syed has established his originality, sensitiveness multidimensional imagery, keenness of perception and vision in his poetry.

Prof. Niranjan Mohanty stresses that Syed's poetry must be examined as a poet of love for whom love emerges not merely as a meaningful subject but a visible metaphor for transcending Reality.

Dr. P. N. Shukla observes that, Syed is a seeker, a wanderer, and a lover too. He would not rest until he realizes the end of his journey. Juxtaposition of the images of mere physicality and blissful eternity makes these verses wear a great immensity and diversity.

Dr. A. N. Dwivedi remarks that Syed Ameeruddin's poetry is largely amourous in content but metaphysical in its tone. There is sheer imagistic delicacy in his verses.

Dr. Richard Eberhart a noted American poet comments that the whole of Ameeruddin's verse is lyrical and subjective silhouting an inexhaustible flow of poets raging vitality. The meditative awareness of the divinity hidden in love is unique in Ameeruddin's creative imagination.

Dr. Panos D. Bardis, yet another American poet asserts that, Ameeruddin is a realist of the senses. The two realities the earth and the soul, are firm in his own. There is verbal magic in his verses. He feels poetry like fire in his hands. His strong sense of suggestivity, gift for sharp imagery, and zest for full participation in life, even where it seems purely sensuous, makes him strikingly different in the contemporary arena of world poetry.

Ameeruddin's subjective poetry grows symbolic and musical as we find in Baudelaire, Mallarme and Valery.

This poem on "A New Love" is unrivalled in love poetry. Syed is first and Rest nowhere.

When we sat face to face

We are like the waves

Gently marching towards the eye of the storm.

When we close our eyes

We descend

The crumbling staircase to oblivion —

A new day breaks from our visual rhapsody

A gesture. A whisper. A word.

A new love springs. A new dawn dances.

We march into the visual ravens:

Doors open Into fitful past —

The cool wind shatters

Into splinters of glass.

The agony of solitude

And opaque life haunts around

The sun gently explodes

And in its fractured mirror

We watch the controversy of hurts

Of the present social debris.

Ameeruddin's poems are an ascension towards love. He attains through love the fullness of Reality. Love yields him its greatest treasure. The act of love surges and resurges. He traces the erotic multi-facets of love and presents in every evocative way the process and evolution of love from the ideal and platonic to the pragmatic and Surrealistic trends of our time :

Gypsy river runs through my bones. This road where you and I stand Leads back to a barren land We have left far behind Let us part.

I must wander.

Do not follow me.

Let the love

in your eyes

blossom

into secret

Constellations".

"Petallic Love Times" are Ameeruddin's lyrsical offerings at the altar of Love, celebrating all the facets, longing, anguish and exhiliration.

When you first came, a mystic myth

you came, quite as the rain that never felL

A fragrance that never revealed.

As a bard, I whispered words

I had never known,

And shall now never forget.

Now your lonesong satchel is fall

of these words, which have grown

Into secret songs. We have known,

And loved, and shared what only

Souls can share in lyric guilt.

Here he experiments with the tradition of love—with its myriad myths, with its varied exuberant exultations of blissful peaks—and abysmal despondencies. He celebrates love in the convention of Kaiidasa—and sometimes in the vibrant vicisitudes of Khaleel Gibran.

The winding galleries of his mind unfurl strange tunes. There is verbal magic in his verses. He feels poetry like fire in his hands. He replaces meanings by suggestions.

Nature to him is a merciless genetic force which transmits to its creatures its own frenzied fury. Love is stripped of its sentimental wrappings and reduced to the starkness of its violent rapture. Ameeruddin hungers for static inward illumination as Lorca did in "Luvia" —

"Love is awakened

in the greyness of its rhythm.

Our interior sky

contains a triumph of blood.

But all our optimism

turns to sorrow

To Contemplate

the dead drops on the glass....

Each drops of Water

trembles on the dim glass

Leaving divine

wounds of diamond".

There are poets of water

who have seen and meditate

Things which

the vast crowds of rivers ignore".

As Ameeruddin says:

Love awake or love asleep

Is a feathered dream ....

....... ........ ......

Life without love and longing

Is a soul dark and heart opaque.

Syed's poetry is the confrontation of his whole being \vith Reality — a basic struggle of the soul, mind and body to comprehend life, to loving order to chaos, and by will and insight create communicable verbal forms for the delight of mankind.

As Juan Lopez-Morillas says of Lyrical primitivism, the world streches before Ameeruddin as an undifferentiated massawe taking the place of understanding and impression is a substitute for analysis. Life is a supreme spectacle and the world of forms dances and peaks to feverish contortions. He dramatises the conflict between primitivism and modernity.

Ameeruddin is restless of the waltzing civilisation. His poetry is lyrical, his feelings flame as images and has the stamp of unique personality. This makes him the finest and most sensitive of contemporary poets.

KRISHNA SRINIVAS

11th July, 1988.

POEM

PETALLIC LOVE TIMES

Part-I

I saw you stranded on a lonesome sandstrip

Turning round your ragged sight at the duskfall

To encounter the sandstorm crossing the highway.

I observed you a woman alone, hopes lost

No mast to hold, no bower to shelter

winding the lonesong street,

With volcanoes in the tresses,

Chasing the whirlwind midnight train.

I sow you clung to the woods,

The hills and the oceans. You pleaded

With the storms, the fire and the fierce night.

You screamed, you yelled -

All in vain. Your voice echoed in the twilight.

No one answered.

You rushed from one memory to the next

And stamped on each door. None of the doors

Opened for you. Only the fog swirled

Around you. The silent beside the

Deep valley mirrored your agony.

I know, all you sought was an answer,

A compassion, a dewy touch.

All you got was silence, and your lonesong.

I do not know, where anything begins,

Simply it happens : It happens !

When I saw you, the compassion of the storms

Filled every fibre of my body.

In the prism of your eyes, I watched

My lonesome songs reverberating. Your

Moony face echoed the rhapsody of my

Cherished dreams. In the twilighty corridors

Of your eyes found my long obsessed search,

And felt as though, a wave facing a wave.

Thus I plunged into your deep saga :

A delightful doll, destined to doom.

You bathed in the flood of moonlight, that nighty

on the silvery shores of scintillating sea.

Then you hugged me with tranquil rivers

Of spirituality oil your bruised shoulders.

Thus, you rose in another city, shedding

The past of the barren lands.

Fugitive moon beckoned you to the restless waves

Under that teaming transparent sky

I saw the twilight rising between

Shadows of your face : A new

Radiance. A new dawn emerged.

While the rivers of guilt grow

Into the secret contours of your bodyscape.

A new zeal. A new rage. A new passion.

Thus sudden enlightening sets fire in your" tresses.

And rain enters my heart through your

Open eyes. I am washed, bleached

Like a water bianshed shore by the restive waves.

Whe'n the sun sets amidst the grim'

Savage silence of the hills, you cartfe

With the azure longuor of the desert,

I filled your golden form in the interior of my soul

When I hold you close to my hairy chest

My heart throbs with rhapsody

Mind filled with ecstasy and

Soul simmers with symphony

In that purple mood

Flood gates of passion break.

I hold your rosy cheeks on the blues

Of my firy palms—and look into your

Blazing eyes with spring flames. I

In your eyes I watch fireflies light up

The future manuscript of my poems.

I am space launched into a golden paradise :

A continuous gaze into your sparkling eyes—

The eyes that threw the floodlight in my dusky soul

The eyes that illumined my winding path

The eyes that revealed the lotus of wisdom

To my opaque mind

The eyes that brought the torrent of roses

To my barren heart.

Now I rise to your dazzling eyes

I live in your eyes and dream of your eyes.

I drown and bask in the white radiance of your eyes.

Because,

The sun never shines as bright as your eyes.

When you first came, a mystic myth

You came, quite as the rain that never fell,

A fragrance that never revealed.

As a bard, I whispered words.

I had never known,

And shall now never forget.

Now your lonesong satchel is full

Of these words, which have grown

Into secret songs. We have known,

And loved, and shared what only

Souls can share in lyric guilt.

There can be nothing truer when

This darkness flowers.

I do not know, where anything begins.

It happens. The rest - solitude,

And symphony of silence follows....

You came upon me

In that nectar spring night

Perplexed with twilight's tantrums

I once again peeped in memories' glass eyes

And stirred the honey filled cells

Of my distant dreams.

And discovered the sweety of my golden realms

only mute hurricane vibrations

And scissoring silence transcends in between us.

Then lilting Whispers echoed :

I am the moon blanshed ocean

You are the moon since I loved you

The cool breeze brings orchestral melodies

At my heart's window

As I visualise the petallic pleasures

Of a strange destiny.

This path of seven colours where we stand

Leads to infinity of golden summer

we have dreamt long before.

Again, you came to me

In that thundering outpour

We stood clasped in each others arms

To celebrate the smoky rainscape

Thus we shared the love in lyric splendour

I entwined you in the snaky grasp

Of my feverish arms, and touched

The secret mounts of your body

In that passion swirled surrounding.

Then I filled my hands

With your dark tresses

To resurrect our love

To the summer splendours.

Memories never fade

Like the footprints on the shores.

The seasons slip

Into your dark tresses.

You combed my dew dripping

Hair with your fitful fingers

And stared into my eyes

With launching sagas

In your bewitching looks.

Thus you brought the whisper of storm

In this summer of petallic love times.

Twilight turned into dark grey.

Only the fugitive moon watching

Our embraces in each others clasp.

The mischievous wind around us

Never trembles as wild as our hearts

When lips touch each others.

Then, with oceans in my viens,

Lightning in my heart,

Hurricane in my mind

And fire on my palms

Looked into your sense mirroring

Musichewn eyes, and watched

The lovelorn twinkle of smothered dreams

Grow into secret constellations.

I love you, you love me,

Sweetnothings exchanged

With the gentle touches

Of honey soaked tongues.

Then you surrounded me with

The oceans in your embrace

Weispering rainbow melodies:

Desire me, and fill my soul

With your lotus presence !

Thus in that strange blue light

Of the fugitive moon, we experienced

The girgling confluence of meeting waters.

Silence grows in an opaque sky:

Birds chirp, sea gulls glide

Sun trembles under the waves

Twilight is scissoring through the mysty dawn

Our fragrance emitting tongues

Twisted in juicy kisses

And our embers wrapped bodies

Burnt in tendrils of our embrace.

In that incense sprinkled moon

We crushed the early sun

In between our quaky bossoms.

The morning wind bathed us

With cool and refreshing sympohnies—

We stood there, hand in hand

Watching lovelorn seascape

Kissing the twilighty forehead of horizon.

Then turning face to face

We whispered enigmas in syllables of silence.

You came to me that evening

In that dusky twilight like an empty river

With oceans of unfulfilled springludes

In your tresses.

With piled horrors in heaps

Of your ghostly past and bleak future.

Your satchel full with lonesome songs

Sans dreams, tears and solitude.

Hurricanes of compassion

Whirled in my gypsy veins :

The nowhereman in me

Found a meadow, a green pasture

I saw the oncoming storm

Of winter blast the ruins

Of my haunting memory.

I saw in you my vague

Poetic search. An artist's Eden.

You saw your demolished dreams

Enter a throughway with no returning.

Volcanoes erupted in your blood streams.

Cycles of spring reeled in your

Whirly mind. Recollections reverberated,

Then you saw the strings of your

Spirit in my simmering languid eyes,

And visualised all your half baked dreams

The brokerr rainbows .of your virgin fancy.

In my pulsating petallic presence.

Rivers of pure passion swirled

In your bruised heart.

Muteness in you played melodies .

You saw your hopes dream

Coming towards you—

"Is he real" you whispered, or

The mind's "vain mirage ?"

Then the tranquil of the dawn settled on your head.

You threw a long treasured kiss and said :

'Glad you came. Glad you recognised'.

Then philosophised—spiritualised :

'Give life, give me love'

In this passionate throbbing present

Take me to the world of oblivion

To the world of purple paradise

Of our long subdued dreams.

Give me life. Fill my soul with your lovev

In this mystic moment

Let me caress wit inflate reality

With love's hungry arms.

At a far distance,

We heard the little birds singing

In virgin boughs of the trees,

Winging through the air

With their little hopes and dreams.

Thus we parted with a sentinel song :

Love awake or love asleep

Is a feathered dream...

Part - II

Oh, the joy of spring and summer again

The sun smiled down upon this quite sea

That reflected our hidden dreams.

The evening twilight has spread

Radiant blossoms and sweet perfumes.

I remember the dusky evening

I met you on that lonestreet

Wih your satchel bellowing with lonesome songs,

When you came first, a mystic myth,

A fragrance that never revealed.

I also remember the words I Whispered

Which have grown into sweet incantations

We have known* and loved and shared

What souls can share in lyric splendour.

It all began like that

Like a sudden onset of a cyclone in a turbulent ocean

You know, how our dreams realised

And found each others strange destiny,,

Through fractured suns and fatigued evenings.

You came to me a strange woman

Singing in the mist a song of blackmoon,

You sang to me sadeyed songs

That unravelled my haunting myths

I evoked purple mamories

Within the wooden scapes of your eyes.

Thus our boats reached their destined shore,

I was a wanderer by a lonely sea.

Gypsy rivers run through my bones.

Tired of my wandering

In search of compatible

Pebbles with my delightful dreams

When I saw you,

Stroms of compassion rushed in my gypsy blood.

I saw you as my hidden dream.

My poetic search. My creative zeal :

My unwritten poem. My soul's eden.

A wandering halt. A meeting of night & day.

And a rapturous reach of the blue horizon.

Again, you came upon me' that evening

In the* summer of tender lovetimes.

On that sun bathed incence spread shores

With encased thoughts and rejuvenated deskes;

We encircled in each others arms—

To steal the colours from the rainbow.

I looked at the shining contours of your body

Passions jumped and rode

On the hooves of wild horses—

We both know what we are thinking about :

Beneath our skin snakes creep,

Flames engulfed our hissing bodies ;

I gently cartessed your breasts

And slowly turned your nutty nipples—

You affectionately combed my hair

With your feverish fingers

You kissed my forehead and whispered:

Let us meet from time to time

Not too often, only when we can.

Glad you came. Glad you recognised.

Give me life. Give me love.

You are my dream. Fill my soul with your desire.

Now, I live, move and breath

In every thoughr of you. You are my world,

The epitome of all my joy, all my gladness.

The mystries of life begin and end in you.

You looked up at the dawn,

Your heart, a morning glory

Opened its petals to a new heaven

Sand—storms growing in the desert

Moon—floors crawling in the sea.

Newly awakened desires

Licked the inns of your dim heart

With winding fire ond flame

And walked in snake—fangs

Through your heaving body.

In that petalled purple moment

Your mind whirled with my thoughts

Your soul filled with the fragrance of my love.

Morning wind fresh in the twilighty dawn,

Musichewn, mischievous, sings love lyrics.

In that golden rage of ragas

You heard my name on the lips of wind

As it touched your longing heart

And filled your soul with roses of my love.

Thus that golden dawn

Opened the portals of fresh desires

And kindled yout heart with flames of fire

That transcend its music

Through deep dales and pastures green.

Dreams of vague memories

Of bouyant virgin fancy

Long treasured in the deeps of heart

Unrolled tapestry of agony and ecstasy,

While your spirit flies to meet my soul

Weaving new golden webs

Before the corridors of my mind.

At that music stirred mood

Your mindscape echoed rahpsodies

of sweet love, scintillating life and hissing hopes

You dived deep down the memory lane

Came out to touch the jingling blues of zenith.

Then dishevelled your dark tresses

Over the canopy of the spectrum of stars :

In love no one knows the origins

No one knows the goal

It's a purple paradise we create

The petalled golden webs of timeless moments

Of evergreen that matters -

If s a pleasant perception of soul,

A pride to plunge into the flames of heart

That makes love - a garden of delight.

Therefore, let*s know each other by our smell

By the stir of our soul,

By the beat of our heart,

And by the breaths of our being.

You are my soul's search

The sweety of my dreams

An artist's conception

A poet's imagination—

I climbed the water falls

Keeling and roaring on a sheet of water

And bent the rainbow in the blue skies

When you dripped nectar from your mouth:

I love you. you love me!

With gentle touches of honey soaked tongue,

I saw blue waves playing

Like sea birds in the depths of your eyes

I watched the secret wildfires of your lust

In the golden glades of your heart.

Your face reflected the colour of faraway rain

Your nowhere hair raged a thundering storm.

The night is quiet. The sea is calm.

For it is scared of the wildscream spring.

Sensuous rivers swirled all around us

As you embraced me with lovelorn warmth

The night enveloped in our

Sweet whispers of oneness...

Tonight let me face my strange destiny.

The honeied memories and petalled pleasures

Drifted to the shores like the foamy waves.

Thus, we celebrated our togetherness—

The confluence of the swirling rivers—

The meeting of the distant sea

With the azure sky—at the horizon...

Throughout that night

On that moon - bathed sands

We drifted apart and

Drifted into each other.

We entwined like tender tendrils

with the elements in full cry.

Only the roars of the distant sky

And the fugitive moon watching

Hurricane of passion swirled around us

And violence in our blood flooded :

At that lotus moment -

I rested my head

On your shrieking thighs

And burried my face

In your buzzing soft belly

Then touched gently with my juicy tongue

Your aching forehead,

Fluttering, feverish eyelids

And flames of lilting lips.

I touched your breast with adoration

And caressed the contours of your waist

And thighs with admiration.

Then whispered into your ears :

You are a beautiful poem.

A sculptor's dream. A statue of Ajanta...

Thus* I touched, smelt all the secret wine waves of your body

And swayed with them in every movement

And listened to the orchestra of sensual melody.

In that trance of romantic rhapsody

Suddanly, ycu twisted tantalisingly

With the twists and wriggles of a fitful snake —

And enclosed my body swarming,

I kissed you on the neck

And tickled your hard nipples - in that

Honey splashing, nectar mood -

ln your ecstasy, you possessed me hard to yourself

To touch the dizzy zeniths of exotic heights.

At that* I entered you as the evening sun

Enters into the dusky deep ocean :

Next morning we woke up

To the twilighty radiance of morning siim

Lilting* juvenile breeze of the dawn

Tickled us into fresh vistas of smiling grass*

I held your dew — twinkling face

On my serene palms —

And saw you vibrant as new leaf

Fresh from the cosmic touch,

Newly plucked—and washed in rain.

Then, I planted a fresh kiss on your rosy cheek.

Your kisses are warmer Chan a sunset hues.

I don't need an edens' glory when I have yon.

Thus, we met from time to time

To build a purple paradise of

spiritual bliss and sensual symphony.

To be in love is holding the moon.

In your arms and walking through the rainbows.

Life without love and longing

Is a soul dark and a heart opaque —

Life without love is a spirit tangled and heart smothered,

Thus, as lovers we met,

Experienced eternity with touching grace.

As lovers we met,

Celebrated tfie scintillating melody of flesh and blood,

Mute we walked among the golden glades

And realised 'forever' as the restive waves,

Part - III

It all ended like that -

Like a sudden devastating deluge

Leaving the mute symphony of a cemetry.

Our loves deep dales,

Pastures green, golden dawns

And twilighty rage of ragas

Smothered - and Vanished into

The dark - savage sky.

The jingling blues of zenith

The lilting flames of Horizon

The smoky rainscape

The resplendent landscape

All turned opaque and

Slipped into white wildefliness.

The lyric splendour of our loves

Spiritual glory and ephemeral joy

Is twisted, trampled and crushed

By the hissing hurricanes of horror

And tumultuous eclipse of time

Into the shrieking realm of vast nothingness.

Petallic Love Times

Now echoes from dismal abyss abound -

Atlast I realised. Bells of reality reverberated.

At heart all love is memory

And mute celebration of souls.

Love is a delectable discovery

A cosy colonisation of inwardness.

The esoteric ethos we have known and shared

What simmering souls can share in Kalidioscopic ecstasy.

As lovers we met.

As lovers we remain forever

celebrating the scintillating

Melody of Eden's glory.

Marching forever and forever

To touch the cosmic crescendo

Among the golden glades of eternity

Unmindful of the volconic erruptions

Of times titilating cruelty.

You are still my dream

The picture of my inward joy

I still fill my soul with your desire

I still live in your eyes and dream of your eyes

You are still the same woman alone

Of my lonesong street.

I am still the same nowhereman

Watching the fireflies lightup

The future manuscript of my poems.

I know, you are my enchanting moon

Since I am your turbulent sun.

I still visualise the petallic pleasures

we experienced and

The purple paradise we explored

Of a strange and deluge like destiny.

Love at heart

Is memory and celebration.

To be in love is holding the sun.

Love fortified or love fractured

Is a many splendoured dream.

( Book Description - Pettalic Love Time - POET PRESS INDIA -Chennai in 1988 - 9 Poems in 52 Pages )

Visioned Summits

2021-04-29T00:45:44+00:00

Visioned Summits

SYED AMEERUDDIN'S POETRY

Syed Ameeruddin combines the flash of Swinburnean rhetoric with cabalistic devices of syntax and imagery. He is dogmatic with the pantheistic vitalism of D.H.Lawrence. In Ameeruddin's poetry creativity is perpetuated by ecstatic bliss. He feels the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh of ours and ours alone and ours vnlyfor a time. We are part of the incanmte cosmos,part of the earth. Blood is part of the sea. There is nothing in us alone. He revels in his poem "Pilgrimage":

Home of course is sweet and serene

For those who discover symphonies of heart:

Home is a place where your heart belongs.

Ameeruddin feels that,mind is the glitter of sun on the surface of existence. Earth is the bed in which the slow copulation of decay is consummated.In his poem "Carrion Carnage" - he cries:

How long this bewildered humanity

To be trapped in such a twilight of melancholy

'Who will deliver these perplexed people

Is there any justice on this volcanic earth

Religion I The very word is nauseating

Then, where is god's benevolence ?

But the Question is, whose God? ?

In another poem "Ambiguity" - he questions:

then,what is Nirvana ?

Reflecting on the smoky Cayers

Of gloom and solace,

And Seeing -

Meaning in ambiguity.

Syed's conception of poetry is at one time inner splendour: another time a passion for encountering and experimenting with the outer realities of life - around him. A poet is a tower of words and Syedplays poetic billiards with words. In his poem "Life's enigma":

All existence

Is being, becoming and withering

And tension between

Imagination and experience.

Ameeruddin is a realist of the senses. The two realities,the earth and the soul, are firm in hisown. The winding galleries of his mind unfurl strange tunes. There is verbal magic in his verses. Green echoes haunt him like a passion. He feels poetry like fire in his hands. He replaces meanings by suggestions. Unsuspected impulses and unfathomable fears throb and explode. In his poem "Whispers of beyond" - he echoes :

"With frozen whispers of beyond

Tfte beyond of the diminishing Cife4ine of tights

I drown in miraged rhapsodies

All your memories a fabricated shadow

Hanging on the ornamental borders of illution

Like a spectrum returning to its broken prism.

Syed plunges into his own interior depths, a going beyond himself an emptying of himself an entry into the naked ground beneath all the visible masks of existence. And the result is, he combines a single moment with centuries, naturalism with profundity, prose rhythms with poetic excellences. As such, he rebels against injustice, the parliament of everydayness, the wicked voyager in virtues seas, the dictatorship of wild regimes, the sway wild flesh and bone, the sweat of bloody atrocities.

Who are we ?

What are we ?

Why are we ?

What is world to Vniverse ?

- Syed asks vehemently.

He feels Man is in process of becoming his own providence, his own cataclysm, his own saviour,his own invading horde of Martians.

In his poem "Wounded Dawn" he laments :

"Unhealed wounds sigh a pain

All through the rain blashed night.

Tears terminate to volcanic upsurge -

Man in ftames - inflames man

Smoke, explosion, annihilation

And smithereen pieces of stinging flesh -

...................................................

The wounded dawn chores the unsung song.

In Syed Ameeruddin's poetry vignettes of everydayness sparkle deliriumed excellences. Dark unfathomed secrecies blaze as discoveries. Common dissents are revered as revelations.Feelings flame as images. Millions of years of heritage and culture flower into magic and profundity. On the whole, there is a mingling of Time past, Time present, and Time Future. In "Whispers of beyond" - he says:

Time an enchanting incantation

Reverberates its way transcending into

The marshlands of frozen fossils

To be distilled in the dar^crucibles of past.

In my talks to University and poets audience all over the world, I always stressed a poet's mission - a divine mission : "when chaos is everywhere, the poet cannot stay out of this turbulence. The poet's part in this Universal drama is really monumental, magnificient. New frontiers, new horizons,new est vistas of space grow so catalytic that the days he lisped on green grass and pure passion are gone. The poet has to raise his mind and its piercing eyes into the white radiance of super realities. The present day poet must vision and prevision the mathematics of futurity. He must crush and crash eternity in his verses."

In the contemporary parnassian world Syed Ameeruddin has emerged as an unique phenomenon - for his poetic mission, spiritual vision, vibrating dynamism, symphonic symbolism, complex imagery and above all for his humanitarian and metaphysical concerns. Syed feels that, poets are the conscience-keepers of their times and have a role to play in the maintenance of peace and harmony in the society. Further, Syed also feels - "A poet exists from moment to moment and he justifies every moment he lives''. Syed's is an erratic wisdom. His contradictions are his poetic excellences. Syed's poetry is the confrontation of his whole being with Reality - a basic struggle of the soul, mind and body to comprehend life, to loving order to chaos, and by will and insight create communicable verbal forms for the delight of mankind.

At times Syed's poetry is highly subjective and lyrical. He celebrates love in the convention of Kalidasa - and some times in the vibrant vicissitudes of Khaleel Gibran. His poem "A New Love " is unrivaled in love poetry :

when we sat face to face

we are like the waves

Gently marching towards the eye of the storm

when we close our eyes we descend

The crumbting staircase to oblivion -

A new day breads from visual rhapsody

A gesture.. A whisper. A new dawn dances.

Syed's talents as a master poet are vividly revealed in his long poem " Eloquent Serenade " -The poem has epic dimensions. He communes with himself - raging beneath tranquil everydayness. His existential crisis and surrealistic ramblings are brought to the fore. He very sensitively capsules the happenings of his time with his own subjective responses.

Syed wants to come out of his earlier nostalgic sentiments :

No, I will not die in your memories

Nor see my face through

The mangredsunlight in your eyes.

I will walk

Into the alphabetic anarchy of stars

March ing into the rebellious night

Ahead, into the azure eyes of futurity.

Syed clearly sets his future manifesto in the above lines - which will certainly take him to the phase of visioned summits. In the same poem -Syed bursts out with highly unconventional, surrealistic confessions :

I will not die in these

paths of nothingness

I shall not be buried In these sullen graveyards

My body shall not be left

For pastures of redemption

My redemption is here,

When I die, I am redeemed

Then, he gives echo to his poetic pride :

A poet never dies,he goes on forever.

No grave can bury him.

No monument can confine him.

A poet is for All times, and for All climes

As a realist - with an existentialists quest - he questions the very existence of human life :

what is this enigma, after all !

Bottoming and peaking encounters

Reaped distresses and harbouring longings

Haze and Maze of Birth, corpulation, death'

Then ends the poem - as a master artist in a non-chalant way :

All is just a blooming boomerang

and a syllabled ding-dong song.

Going beyond Rimbaud, Syed creates poem -illumination, a synthetic explosion of colour, emotion and perpetual movement. Like Blake, he merges spiritual vision and poetry, feeling the Joy of being, the Joy Supreme. His Prophetic words must be felt - they are the living views of Universe, holding keys to eerie secrecies.

'Visioned Summit' - is his master piece poem. Syed has proved that, he is the Bard of the Far Beyond,with his mesmerising mission and munificent message. He is Arobindonian in his thought process and Tagorian in his mystic vicissitudes and Yeats-like in his transparent symbolism and exploding imagery. This poem establishes the " Oneness of Reality comprising the existential base and flowering of consciousness culminating in Ananda - Supreme bliss :

Thus, I visioned summits of illumined peaks

Of benign Nirvana,Aham Brahman,Anal Huq.

And touched a moment eternal

Breathing the diinne light of bliss -

The Sat - Chit -Ananda !

Syed is a poet with a difference. He is unique in his poetic craftsmanship. There is splendour and lyrical grandeur in his verses. Creative energy, freshness of style, metaphysical force, characterize his poetic masterpieces. The collapse of ideals, the fleeting frontiers between known and unknown make him restless,and verses strike lightnings from his eternal mind. Expanded moment are opened and Syed descends into these moments. Eruptions happen, loosening poetry from its moorings and taking new directions. Hence, poetry to Syed is a revelation, exploration, discovery and illumination - its values extended to eternity.

Ameeruddin is Primarily a poet of social, metaphysical, spiritual and humanitarian concerns and philosophical encounters to unravel the seeming realities of life. He uses his imagery and symbolism with zest and dexterity. His style is simple, direct, lucid and lilting. His expression is exquisite, forceful and facile. However, Syed emerges as a poet of many excellences, with his magical and vibrant verses. A serious observer of his poetry will find in him a happy confluence of thought profundity, verbal ecstasy, visual beauty and imagistic delicacy.

Ameeruddin's poetry explores the broad range of human thought and experience, that provoke, inform, illuminate and entertain.He achieves an apocalyptic union of subject and object, earth, the inner psyche and heaven. In this dark night of metaphysical quest, he establishes a self co-extensive with the universe. As such, his poetry sparkle with delight, ring with wonder, and shimmer deepest awe. On this account, he is a rare phenomenon in the contemporary field of world poetry today.

KRISHNA SRINIVAS

POEM

VISIONED SUMMITS

I am yet to explore

The frontiers of longest pilgrimage

Of life's vast vicissitudes.

The unsolved dazzling enigmas

The mysterious spiraling paths

Of passion and peace.

Sliced silences

And broken whispers

frozen murmurings

And shimmering shrieks

Phenomenal recurrences

Of exits and entrances

Enactment of farces multitudinous

The beginning, ripening and the kerneling.

Clasping ecstasies

Throbbing for mix.

Miraged rhapsodies

Longing to be harboured.

Churning of the. base and apex

To the illumined peaks.

The eye of the cyclone

Has centred in my innerworld

To unravel the mystery

That hovers around me.

I am crest fallen,

Vanquished and disillusioned.

With my vain adventures

Of mundane exploration.

Restlessness reverberates

Into a frenzied trance

Darkness Dwindles to drench

In the twilight dawn.

Unknown galaxies syllabled

To sprawling spheres

Unheard melodies

In ogerish skies bewildered

And mute symphonies

In ogling oceans aghast.

Atlast, my search

Has become a quest beyond

A resounding voyage

Into the realm of light,

To unfathom the eerie secrecies

And revered revelations.

from my flights

Through darting darkness

I started moving

Into the blazy nothings -

Pouring all the tornadoes

Of ageless thoughts from the abyss

Of my dismal mind.

My' Mahaprasthan' passes through

The valley of sorrow,

Mountain of joy

And verdant woods

Of metaphysical maze,

Into the abyss of peace

To reach the endless

Ocean of tight,

Love and beauty

Realising the Radiating syndromes

Which brought me into life,

And life into me.

Thus, I crossed

The pulverising paths

Of flesh, Philosophy

And panicky poise

And reached the haloing goal

Of my zvhirly voyage,

Racing to orgasm

Of spicy source

To visualise

The mimble orchestra

Of delightful nimbus.

Lightening flashed in me

Racing my rinds

With tremoric lips, I quivered:

Master! Is this the ocean of tight!

Master! Is this the radiance of beyond

At that mind blowing, soul splashing

Ecstatic moment of engulfing blues

And flames of Brilliant hues,

The vibrant divine within me Blazes :

La Ilaha llial Laha!

Salam I Salam I Salam I

Peace Be withyou!

My crimson Being further sparkles:

Ekam Eva Advitiyam Brahman I

Oml Shantil Shantil Shantil

Thus, I visioned

Summits of illumined peaks

Of Begin 'Nirvana

Aham Brahman, Anal Haq,

And touched a moment eternal

Breathing the divine light of bliss -

The Sat - Chit -Ananda !

'Dark night reaches its dawn

Midnight tremor merges into mellowness

The trance comes to a poise

Fragrance of the ecstatic dream

Remain afresh, lingering and,

Lilting down the memory lane

reminding the magnificient moon

Of 'Buddha Purnima ' -

"Only those return to 'Eternity

Who on earth seek out Eternity"

( Book Description - Visioned Summits - Published by -International Poets Academy - Chennai in 1995 - 21 Poems in 160 Pages )

Visions Of Deliverance

2021-04-29T00:43:49+00:00

Visions Of Deliverance

POETRY SYED AMEERUDDIN...

Syed Ameeruddin combines the flash of Swinburnean rhetoric with cabalistic devices of syntax and imagery. He is dogmatic with the pantheistic tdtalism of D.H. Lawrence. In Ameeruddin's poetry creativity is perpetuated by ecstatic bliss. He feels the magnificent 'here' and 'now' of life in the flesh of ours and ours alone and ours only for a time. We are part of the incarnate cosmos, part of the earth. Blood is part of the sea. There is nothing in us alone. He revels in his poem "A Prayer for my Grandson".

Alas!

All the values of -

Moses, Jesus, Mohammed and Ram,

Have ended in a dreadful fiasco.

And beleagueringly boomeranged on Man

To create fissures of fury

And disenchantment, to inflict

A deluge of-

Rambling rubbles of debris

And decomposed -Dragony pieces of human flesh.

Ameeruddin feels that, mind is the glitter of sun on the surface of existence. Earth is the bed in which the slow copulation of decay is consummated. Syed plunges into his own interior depths, a going beyond himself, an emptying of himself - an entry into the naked ground beneath all the visible masks of existence. And the result is, he combines a single moment with centuries, naturalism with profundity, prose rhythms with poetic excellences. As such, he rebels against injustice, the parliament of everydayness, the wicked voyager in virtues seas, the dictatorship of wild regimes, the sway wild flesh and bone, the sweat of bloody atrocities. In one of his poems, heralding the New Millennium -he cries :

The beginning -

Of the New Millennium

Witnessed -

The volcanic human infernos

Of startled shattered

World trade fair peaks,

Thundering tribulations

Sneaking Afganisthan

Bosnian, Somalian heaps -

Of Hissing human ashes

The bereaved rubbles -

Of the battered Baghdad.

And the eternal -

Tigress in tears of blood...

In Syed Ameeruddin's poetry vignettes of everydayness sparkle deliriumed excellences. Dark unfathomed secrecies blaze as discoveries. Common dissents are revered as revelations. Feelings flame as images. Millions of years of heritage and culture flower into magic and profundity. In one of his poem - he says :

Who are you my little angel!

What is this savagery -

At the threshold of this New century?

There is holocaust -

In every heart!

There is shimmering sham -

In every soul!

What lessons -

Of sanity and oneness of Man

We can impart -To our generations to come?

In the contemporary Parnassian world Syed Ameeruddin has emerged as an unique phenomenon for his poetic mission, spiritual vision, vibrating dynamism, symphonic symbolism, complex imagery and above all for his humanitarian and metaphysical concerns. Syed feels that, poets are the conscience -keepers of their times and have a role to play in the maintenance of peace and harmony in the society. Further, Syed also feels - "A poet exists from moment to moment and he justifies every moment he lives''. Syed's is an erratic wisdom. His contradictions are his poetic excellences. Syed's poetry is the confrontation of his whole being with Reality - a basic struggle of the soul, mind and body to comprehend life, to loving order to chaos, and by will and insight to create communicable verbal forms for the delight of mankind.

At times Syed's poetry is highly subjective and lyrical. He celebrates love in the convention of Kalidasa - and some times in the vibrant vicissitudes ofKhaleel Gibran. His poem "A New Love" is unrivaled in love poetry :

When we sat face to face

We are like the waves

Gently marching towards the eye of the storm

When we close our eyes We descend

The crumbling staircase to oblivion -

A new day breaks from visual rhapsody

A gesture. A whisper. A new dawn dances.

Syed's talents as a master poet are vividly revealed in his long poem "A Prayer for my Grandson" - the poem has epic dimensions. He communes with himself - in the form of - addressing his Grandson - raging beneath tranquil everydayness. His existential crisis and surrealistic ramblings are brought to the fore. He very sensitively capsules the happenings of his time with his own subject responses :

You are a pilgrim -

With infinite goals with

A mellowed, message of-

"Share Joy! -

Share Sorrow ! -

Share Nature!" -

To bring radiating brilliance •

Into the shrunken ghostly faces -

Of withering Mankind

And to blow -

The titanic trumpet

Of gurgling gospel -

Of life without tears

To plant rustic simplicity -

Of shimmering smiles

To embrace life, nature and cosmos

As-

One Entity,

One Creation,

One Divinity!

Going beyond Rimbaud, Syed creates poem -illumination, a synthetic explosion of colour, emotion and perpetual movement. Like Blake, he merges spiritual vision and poetry, feeling the joy of being, the joy Supreme. His prophetic words must be felt - they are the living views of Universe, holding keys to eerie secrecies.

Visions of Deliverance - is his masterpiece poem, with an epical grandeur. Syed has proved that, he is the Bard of the Far Beyond, with his mesmerizing mission and munificent message. He is Arobindonian in his thought process and Tagorian in his mystic vicissitudes and Yeats like - in his transparent symbolism and exploding imagery. Blake like - in his metaphysical connotations and Dante like - in his divine dazzling visions. This poem explores the visions of -'here, here-after and ever-after'. This poem establishes the "Infinite reality" comprising the existential base and flowering of consciousness culminating into the eternal - 'Here After'-the eternal 'realm of resplendent'. Further, mesmerizingly - envisions the souls journey from the dark - to the delectable destiny of - 'The Ever After' -with the ONE - the 'Eternal light' - lilting, in 'Ananda'. The Supreme Btiss :

The resplendent radiance

Of ever after and hereafter -

The realization of supreme fulfillment -

The Moksha ! The Magfirat! The Nirvana !

The blow of"Soor"! The Drumbeat!

The Shriek of Shankh !

Deliverence I Deliverence ! Deliverence !

Dr. Prem Verma, a well-known critic and a senior professor from Delhi University - in her analysis of Syed's recent collection of poems - 'Visions of Deliverence' - very judiciously sums up - Syed's poetry - as "The Earthly and the Ethereal". Dr. Prem Verma writes :

"Syed Ameeruddin's 'Visions of Deliverence' comes across - as a work of many facets ranging from the downright sensuous to the purely mystic and the spiritual. In this book the earthly and the ethereal, or the mundane and the spiritual, combine with ease and fluidity, the one merging into the other so imperceptibly that it is impossible to demarcate where one begins and the other ends.

In this collection, there are a number of fascinating love poems - consists of what are, prima facia, love poems, but the love that the poet speaks of is a love that exists on various levels of consciousness. The poem 'Broken whispers' begins : "you are away now, somewhere beyond" and then reminiscing about a past that "lies smothered / On the reverberating shores of time", sets the tone of the whole book by combining the sensuous with the sublime.

In many of the poems even the line between waking and dreaming is as blurred as that between physical and spiritual love. When one reads :

My love, come and wait for me

At the duskfall on a lovelorn shore,

Where twilight breaks

On a fevered evening

To celebrate our pure love

From everlasting to everlasting

Winding through scissoring

Blue seascapes and purple skyscapes,

To touch the golden dawn of eternity

In the fleeting flickers of drowsy dusk.

Poem : 'Love Song'.

It begins like any other love poem but long before the end of the stanza we are left with asking - is it physical love or is it a spiritual love that the poet is talking about. It is this unique mingling of the earthly and the sublime, of the momentary with the eternal, of the sensual with the mystical, that makes Syed Ameeruddin }s poetry different and gripping.

This questioning on the part of the reader may also be the result of the way Ameeruddin plays with the language. It does not take him long to switch over from the concrete to the abstract, from the transient to the intransient, from one experience to the "Cycling and recycling" of experience. A number of the poems begin with the voice of the lover talking to his beloved, but by the end the speaker is sounding more like a sage.

There are however poems where he allows pure physical love,full of eroticism to take center stage, like:

In that trance of romantic rhapsody

Suddenly, you twisted tantalizingly

With the twists and wriggles of a fitful snake -

And enclosed my body swarming

I kissed you on the neck

And tickled your hard nipples - in that

Honey splashing, nectar mood -

In your ecstasy, you possessed me hard to yourself

To touch the dizzy zeniths of exotic heights;

At that, I entered you as the evening sun

Enters into the dusky deep ocean.

-Poem : 'Love Times'

This is perhaps one of the few poems where the physical passion seems to take over completely while drowning out the more sublime aspects of love, but in most of the other poems, balance (however delicate) is maintained, by talking about souls and rebirths, eternity and timelessness.

Even the poems that focus on relationships, Being written for specific people on specific occasions, are not entirely devoid of the spiritual mysticism that seems to permeate the volume, The "Birthday Song - For my son..." begins like a normal celebratory poem in the first stanza but then moves into the realm of timelessness and eternity as it proceeds. He begins by telling us how his dreams became "a delectable reality" when the son was born, but goes on to say "I am part of the galaxy" and he feels he is linked to Eternity.

And thus sparkles my dream Songs

Into the timeless infinitum

Through our little Titan

The light, the Delight

The bliss, The Blessings

Of the sacred - SYED -

The spiritual offspring -

Our Flesh, Spirit and Blood - the shinning Star

of New Millennium

The Jewel - the 'AMEEN'....

The poem written for his grandson on the other hand does not show this sort of a movement. On the contrary, it becomes more generalized when it takes on the form of a commentary on good and evil. The "Drumbeats of eDampatya' written for his wife is, however, a perfect fusion of the single and the universal, of love and spirituality, of the earthy and the ethereal. It has, in my opinion, just the right mixture, the right balance, and makes for a beautiful poem.

Going back to his generalization of good and evil, it can be noticed that Ameeruddin seems fond of making this sort of commentary. This same aspect dominates his poems on the "New Year" and one of his classic poem "My India". To give an example I quote from "New Year".

Years come, Years go,

Lets celebrate this New Year

With a resolve to harness

The beast in Man and to retain

The smile on every Human Face.

I do not wish to spend too much time on these poems and just, I would like to point out in passing that the theme of carnage, bloodshed and violence is so prominent in the poet's mind that it succeeds in encroaching even where we least expect it. The two versions of "My India" are like crying out loud where the poet bemoans the new India where "sinister looks" have taken away "the smiles from innocent faces" and instead of the "grandeur" and peace of the old India there are "blownup automobiles", "shattered houses" and" hijacked victims" and the air is full of "shrieks of pain" and shouts of crime". The "Godhra infernos" and the "Gujarat carnages" have successfully created "the stench/Of rotting flesh" where even the vultures are "Aghast / At this nauseating / Excess of human stink".

The theme has seeped into the poet's soul to the extent that in "A Prayer - for my Grandson..." where the mood should have been celebratory, he talks of a New Millennium.

Celebrating the mutilations

Of horific holocausts

The environment gets engulfed in gloom as the poet recalls how religious differences have created "fissures of fury" resulting in "A deluge of rambling rubbles ofdebris/and decomposed dragony pieces of human flesh".

I have felt the necessity to discuss this briefly as I wish to point out that this aspect of his poetry becomes so strong that it undermines the ethereal content of his poems that is so predominant otherwise.

The title poem "Visions of Deliverance" begins with the theme of "tumultuous devastation" but is allowed to run underground after a while, as it is, after all a Vision of Deliverance. The poem reads like one of those "near death experiences".

Having painted a picture of misery and unhappiness in the first five stanzas of the poem he goes on to talk of a time:

When the soul is freed

From the cozy cage

Of myopic craze

And

Man is catapulted

To the void of voids.

When the soul is catapulted to "the center of the still center" it meanders on its way.

Each seeping soul

Is an enchantment

Bewildered and baffled

In a blissful reverie

Singing seismic symphonies

In sephulcre silence

From womb to tomb

From dust to bloom -

Denoting the predicament;

'Everlasting to everlasting'.

The Visions of Deliverance however does not end there. Having traced the journey of the soul from the womb to tomb, he goes beyond where the souls encounter "twin tunnels" at the "beacon light". The dark and despicable souls are "crushed and crashed" in an "abysmal sea of fire" and "tortured to molten pieces". He envisions these souls being punished, not in an everlasting fire, but "in fumes" where they are;

Drifted into layers within layers

Of flames- multidimensional

Till a space of timeless time -

Till - the souls are crystalled and crafted

Moulded and shaped - in molten lava

To the pristine peaks of purity

And then finally bathed

In the mellowed flames of green

And made to wait in repentance

To receive the radiance

To grace of eternal light

To experience the eternity

And the blissful - eternal bounty.

Having told us about the evil souls plight he goes in to follow the other souls who enter the second tunnel. They are in ecstasy bathed in "a spectacular panorama of light". These souls have attained the ultimate enlightenment or what the poet calls "Deliverance". The poet wakes up from his vision to discover it was a dream. But what makes it so fascinating is the concept of the bad souls being "purified" and not as many people believe, in an everlasting hell. It is interesting to note that this is the same concept that is offered by writers like Melvin More in his 'Where God Lives' and James Van Praagh in 'Reaching to Heaven'. In this respect I can put Ameeruddin on the plane of a guru -'a mellowed mystic' - who has had a vision of the afterlife and of deliverance, not only for himself, but for all of us".

Syed is a poet with a difference. He is unique in his poetic craftsmanship. There is splendour and lyrical grandeur in his verses. Creative energy, freshness of style, metaphysical force, characterize his poetic masterpieces. The collapse of ideals, the fleeting frontiers between known and unknown make him restless, and verses strike lightning's from his eternal mind. Expanded moments are opened and Syed descends into these moments. Eruptions happen, loosening poetry from its moorings and taking new directions. Hence, poetry to Syed is a revelation, exploration, discovery and illumination - its values extended to eternity.

Ameeruddin is primarily a poet of social, metaphysical, spiritual and humanitarian concerns and philosophical encounters to unravel the seeming realities of life. He uses his imagery and symbolism with zest and dexterity. His style is simple, direct, lucid and lilting. His expression is exquisite, forceful and facile. However, Syed emerges as a poet of many excellences, with his magical and vibrant verses. A serious observer of his poetry will find in him a happy confluence of thought profundity, verbal ecstasy, visual beauty and imagistic delicacy.

Ameeruddin }s poetry explores the broad range of human thought and experience, that provoke, inform, illuminate and entertain. He achieves an apocalyptic union of subject and object, earth, the inner psyche and heaven. In this dark night of metaphysical quest, he establishes a self co-extensive with the universe. As such, his poetry sparkle with delight, ring with wonder, and shimmer deepest awe. On this account, he is a rare phenomenon in the contemporary field of world poetry today.

KRISHNA SRINIVAS

POEM

VISIONS Of DELIVERANCE

What is this magnificent Extravagance,

Of tumultuous devastations

The hoary diadems

And eerie furies.

The enraged alien

Alphabetic acrobats

The frozen lava

In labyrinthine lilts,

The dark ebony spheres

Of phallic deliriums.

'What is this cluster

Of hurricane clouds,

The shimmering shrieks

Of smithereen souls

The cyclonic unleash

Of kenneled thunders

The churny gurgle

Of roaring volcanoes

The shivering peaks

And scissoring slopes

The trembling rills

And terrified oceans.

What is this rottening riot of glee!

Sind stinging stains of spree

The splash of spirits on fumes ablaze

The rhythmic plethora

Of edited exists

The fractured joys

And juried raptures

The puerile play

Of flamy traumatic force

The f[asft of purple woes

In delirious souls

What is this vast vista

Of mind-blowing tornado.

The tangled mesh

Of frenz ied flesh

The vibrant aftermath

Of vivacious vagrancy

The squeezing life

And melting metamorphosis

The aspen pantomime

Of rainbow shades

The seeking escapades

In epicentre of infernos.

What is this voyage?

from lone to lone

from ethereal slumber

To tyrannous trance

Beyond the hissy hues

Of heathenly darks

beyond the seeping shores

Of luscious light

Beyond the naked world

Of rickety reach

Beyond the darkness deeped

'Doors of Tombs abysmal.

When the soul is freed

From the cozy cage

Of myopic craze

Man is catapult

To the void of voids.

He is not the intellect

He introspected

Die is not the self -

He lived

He is not the thought -

He harboured.

All hussy whispers

Of esoteric bounds - lost

All fuming foams

Of fidgety flesh - annulled

All criss - crossing souls

In perpetuating peril

Booming their blurry way

To the centre of the still centre.

The smoky glare sinks

Into meandering mansions

Beyond -far Beyond

The timeless frontiers

Roaring - Reverberating

Neti... Neti... Neti....

"Each seeping soul

Is an enchantment,

Bewildered and baffled

In a blissful reverie

Singing seismic symphonies

In sephulcre silence

from womb to tomb

from dust and bloom -

Denoting the predicament :

"Everlasting to everlasting'.

This phenomenon

Is hazy and smoky -

Each soul must chart

Its fleverecent flight - alone

And voyage its way

To dwindling tips and downs

Through its scintillating strength

And fascinating filtery faltings

Meandering seeded worlds

Seeded firmaments

And orbiting nebulae endless.

The spectacular odyssey

Of the souls in multitude

Enters - layers of dark

Waves above the waves

Ripples within the ripples

In dreadful ocean

Of dark - dark - dark -

And reaches a halt

before the tantalizing

Beacon light - the twin tunnels...

Dark and despicable souls

Drowned in hatred and ignorance

Led by the fire flashing smithies

Into the abysmal sea of fire

Then the souls are crushed

To be crushed and crashed

And tortured to molten pieces

As dazzling splinters of fire balls.

These voluptuous souls

In aghast - in repentance

further orbited in the fuming

Whirpools of torrential furies...

Fire, Fire, Fire - everywhere

Red fire, Blue fire, Qreen fire

An agonizing spectacle of fire

A devastating deluge of fire

In this firmament of floods of fire

The fire breathing smithies

In the delirium of gushing fire

Busy in shevelling,

Shattering and shafting

The black souls - heathen bound

Into the vicarious volcanoes

Of flamboyant flames of doom.

Thus these souls in fumes

Drifted into layers within layers

Of flames - multidimensional

Till a space of timeless time

Till - the souls are crystalled and crafted

Moulded and shaped - in molten lava

To the pristine peafe of purity.

And then finally bathed

In the mellowed flames of green

And made to wait in repentance

To receive the radiance

The grace of eternal light

To experience the eternity

And the blissful - eternal bounty.

Into the other tunnel - resplendent

Driven the shimmering souls

That are true and righteous

By the messengers of light

In bright magnificent wings...

Here the souls in bellowing ecstasy

Incited in trance to see the sparkles of light.

Light - Light - Light - everywhere

The light blue, the light green,

the light white...

All a spectacular panorama of light

A tightening reverie.

An enticing illumination.

A tune of welcome - to the bliss of here - after.

Thus, the souls of purple deeds

Received and traversed - through

Labyrinthine vicissitudes of light...

Light upon light - Light within light

Into the exalted layers,

Of munificence of light

Till the silvery souls -

Reached the gardens of 'Eternal Homes'

Under which - lilting icy rivers flow

This is the delectable destiny - ever after

Only to be with ONE, The Eternal light

Experiencing the eternal Bliss

The Sat - Chit - Ananda -

Salam - Salam - Salam -

The peace of Eternal Bounty

The resplendent radiance

Of Ever after and Here after -

The realization of Supreme fulfilment -

The Molina ! The Maqfirat! The Nirvana I

The blow of 'Soor'!

The Drumbeat !

The Shriek of Shankh !

Deliverance ! Deliverance ! Deliverance !

* * *

When I opened my eyes

From my throttled dream

My crimson eyelids

Gleam rambling reflections

Of the life - 'Here After'

Aghast! Crestfallen! Dumb-struck

Just looked at the glitter

Of the gurgling galaxy

And saw the light

That bubbles myriad star

And ascends on tipsy toes...

The azure stairs

Lighting the peaks

Of spheres with torn tapers

Telling the tale

Of flesh and guilt...

Transience of life

Transmigration of soul -

Reminding the moment

Of inevitable - "Big Bang'

Fana ! Fana ! Fana I

Into the eternal - 'Here After'

The eternal realm of resplendent.

( Book Description - Visions Of Deleverance - Published by - International Poets Academy - Chennai - in 2006 - ( ISBN 81-900653-2-7 ) - 30 Poems in 235 Pages )