Editor's Choice
Theme: Mother

Mother, My Mother, The Good Earth

Mother, mother, my mother,
the good earth,
Mother, mother, my mother,
turned into the good earth.

With tears in my eyes,
I remember my mother,
Dead and gone by...

Her asthi-kalasha,
I still remember it
Hanging
One midnight
When I opened the door.

Under the clay cover
Lay it hanging the urn
With the extinguished navel
To be immersed in.

Did I pinda-dana
For the bereaved soul
And its shantih,
Wailing and wandering
With the wind and searching

Making the earth, sky,
Water, fire
And wind,
All the five elements
With which the body is composed
A witness of that.

Mother, mother, good mother
turned into good earth,
She is no more.
Just the image of her in me,
Just the photo with me to see
How she was!

12-May-2014

More By  :  Bijay Kant Dubey

Views: 1390     Comments: 4

Comments on this Poem

Comment The Asthi-Kalasha
The asthi-kalasha of the mother
Lay it hanging,
Just the asthi-kalasha
When I opened the door
Saw I the asthi-kalasha
Of my mother dead and gone by
Who was just a day ago,
But not now.

The asthi-kalasha of my mother
With a clay cover
As to hide in the ashes
And the navel
From the nightly birds of prey
For to be immersed into the holy waters.

Pinda-Dana
O bereaved soul and spirit,
Paternal and maternal
And ancestral,
You take, take the dana,
O soul wailing and wandering with the wind,
Maya and moha
And the bhutatma,
O mind, matter and mass,
You take, take it
The things,
The pindas
Supposed to be!

O fire, water, earth,
Wind and sky,
With the elements of yours
In composition,
Take you, take you,
The pindas given to
By being a witness to that
And release the soul
From all the bonds
As for the return journey!

Bijay Kant Dubey
13-May-2014 13:36 PM

Comment Heartfelt poem ... A great tribute to " Mother ". Best wishes .

Mohini Gurav
13-May-2014 11:41 AM

Comment Thank you, sir.
The credit goes to the two editors and I am really beholden to them in utter gratitude and obligation. Had they not published, I would have lost my poems. After having written my small books of poems, The Ferryman (Songs of Soul), My Father, My Love Poems, My Collected Poems, My Bengali Wife, Chandramukhi and others in between 1986 and 2001, I stopped publishing my ventures. I finished How Far Indian Is Indian English Poetry? and D.H.Lawrence:His Personality & Works. Side by side kept writing poems in English, now almost 5000 to 8000 poems in English with the comments of Khushwant Singh, M.K.Naik, Shirish V.Chindhade, K.C.Shrivastava, C.V.Venugopal, S.Krishna Bhatt, K.Balachandran, K.S.Ramakrishna Rao, Prema Nandakumar, I.K.Sharma, R.K.Singh, R.A.Singh, O.J.Thomas, P.C.Katoch, I.K.Sharma, G.D.Barche, O.N.Gupta, D.H.Kabadi, R.R.Menon, Simanchal Patnaik, A.H.Tak, Niranjan Mishra, Sarbeswar Samal, R.Raj Rao, Adil Jussawalla, Jaynat Mahapatra, P.K.Joy, Kulwant Singh Gill, Hazara Singh, D.C.Chambial, M.L.Kaul, Pronab kumar Majumder and so on.
Asthi-Kalasha and Pinda Dana are two voluminous collections of poems, running to near about two hundred pages in total. Many of the poet friends have gone through the manuscripts, but they take not the name of those works of Bijay Kant Dubey writing since 1987. Whether they write about me or not, but I shall not call myself a poet repudiating morality and its ethics. Only one thing that I know is this that God is there.

Bijay Kant Dubey
13-May-2014 08:29 AM

Comment dear dubey
your moving poem remembering the asthi
we share the sentiments and remember our mothers on the mother's day
after coming into boloji both of us prospering
stay writing day in and day out
all the best
rama rao

vadapalli.rama rao
13-May-2014 02:23 AM


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