Jamuna is one of those poems which have been excerpted from Keshav Malik’s poetry collection named Islands of Mind: Poems published in 1992, and these speak of his artistic bent of mind and the rudimentary idea, thought and reflection they contain in to reflect it otherwise. Keshav Malik is first of all an artist, an art-critic and an editor before being a poet and he writes from the art point of view rather than a pure literary perspective. His poems contain in a series of reflections and stray ideas difficult to be penetrated if we think thematically.

A Delhite he takes a river view of the Yamuna standing afar and by being closer to it too, but the river appears lovely when seen from far and the more he is closer to, the more the things surface over realistically. The poet too sees the lines of his own face reflecting upon, quivering over the surface of the waters. The rubber dolls can be seen floating on with so many left out ones or thrown into the water’s stuffs. Immersed goddesses and the vestiges too can be seen.

Water birds scatter they when the poet approaches them, they shift their places taking short flights. Dogs and doves run and fly at the advance of a shadow.

The river flows by as usual as the course of its run is, crossing by the ghats, the flowers of the dead, the noon-sun sheeted landscape and the sand bars. To flow and pass by is the song of the river, but how have the things undergone changes? 

The cancerous river still with a sufficient current keeps flowing, carrying away the things lying adrift, afloat, all through a silvery horizon lurking around the place. The leaf lying low, the skull lying sunk in the mud-bank, there is more to say. Silver on silver appears to be piled upon. Everywhere light and silver go interplaying.

The poet shows the cityscape through which the river passes, flows by, how the banks of it, how the city space dotting it, how the waters, but what is it that has gone missing?

How the course of the river? How that of ours? What is it gone amiss? Where is the river going? And where are we? How have we changed it the world? The poem is a view of the Yamuna and its riverbanks sprawling Delhi, passing by it. Has the Yamuna remained it the same Yamuna or has undergone changes? Have we remained intact? Where are we going in search of a silver lining? Where does the lining lead to? Why is there a void? A vacuum in life? How is our existence, the existence of man?

distant views are best;
closer, the lines of my own face
quivering upon the reflecting waters.

face, amongst flotsam---
rubber-dolls, talcum-tins, immersed goddesses;
vestiges of the once adored—-
all undergone revolution, white.

water-birds scatter as I approach,
to settle on sand-bar 
or farther ashore---
even dogs and doves run or fly 
at the advance of a shadow.

there’s nothing for it
but look once more
on the face liquefying
taking on a watery root---

river-water, that carries away
its own---by the dead spiced,
by marigolds, with the silver-foil 
of a noon-sun sheeted.

silver, no tinsel;
silver on silver---
silver the sounding of the steel-strings,
silver in the mouth of the man-on-the-moon,
on fish-plate, in the ant’s load of grain.  

the cancerous river, still with a sufficient current
to sweep out in silver curves;
the mid-day breeze wherever it blow
tease silver to light---
in the leaf lying low, on skull sunk in mud-bank
silver, and an all truce---
no war more.