Now say you, which Dawn poem is better, one beginning with, ‘Out of the dark it whirls back’ or another with, ‘The foothills are quiet, it’s another day’? It is a matter of choice and judgement. I cannot which one likes or not. While reading the poems, we get reminded of John Donne’s The Sun Rising. The pictures of Dinkar and Prasad come before the eyes.

A lovely dabbling and penetration in imagery, the two Dawns are excellent pieces so panoramic and picturesque in quality.

It is really enlightening to compare both the poems as the kernels of poetic thoughts tend to be existential and unknowledgeable in their ingredients. The shroud of mystery, how to unveil it? How to tread on the dewy green grass-laden untrodden paths of life? There is something of photography. It is not the morning, but the dawn-break to attract us.

There are many Dawn poems written by Jayanta Mahapatra as he has about Morning, Evening, Twilight and Night with varying moods and features and this Dawn is one such among them. What it strikes us most in reading him is his indifferent mood and delving, his note of despair and nothingness and his signature is a signature in silence. His initials are on the sands of the seashore as Spenser writes it in One Day I Wrote Her Name. The wind keeps sighing by waves beating against the shore, rising and falling. How is the word of silence? Matter and mass remain it the same. What does it change it here? Only the shapes keep it changing here. How do the atoms and particles form the atmosphere? How the process of fusion and fission? But apart from being a physicist and his reading of light and darkness, he is good at picturizing the Indian rural woman. How are our morals about her? What liberty and freedom does she enjoy? How is her life? Will our thoughts not go to her? How long will she remain unknown, a persona without a name? Silhouettes and shadows too do it not justice to her.

Things will go in their way as nothing can change their pattern. We will take to the routes taken to so far. Beyond this, what more to say to?

Dawn has always eluded it with its enchanting beauty and radiation, golden light falling upon and dazzling. Out of the dark it whirls back into the darkly mysterious house. The poet sees the dawn, the break of it. How does it arise after breaking the ripples of silence during the morning? 

How is the origin of the dawn? How does it break upon, redden and glow out? How do the rays come out? How do the beams?

The silent, sedate and serene lotus of the morning opens new vistas and the dawn radiating Buddha with the raised hand blessing the world. 

From the dark domains it does appear on searing and tearing and it returns to. Why is it so riddling? What it the puzzle, the crossword of the dawn reflecting and retreating and flashing and dazzling?

The banana leaves wet with mist is but an image. How do the things clear it? How does darkness get cleared for a morning of silence and from the same ripples of silence the dawn keeps breaking, is it not?

The story of the dawn is as such, the story of the creation. But the dawn always keeps walking alone as our silences are.

The temple bells breaking the lull of silence and the rippling golden dawn and as thus the story begins it.

The echoes of Henry Vaughan’s Bells can be heard in the poem. The crow too is black, and the night too is so.

Out of the dark it whirls back
into a darkly mysterious house.

Is it the earth within?
Does it keep us waking, give brief respite?

Like a hard crossword puzzle
it sets riddles crowding against one another:

the thunders trailing around hatchet-faced banana leaves,
a front gate limp with dew,

the acid sounds of a distant temple bell,
the wet silent night of a crow that hangs in the first sun.

Is the dawn only a way through such strange terrain?
The frenzy of noise, which a silence recalls

through companions lost, things found suddenly?
There is a dawn which travels alone,

without the effort of creation, without puzzle.
It stands simply, framed in the door, white in the air:

an Indian woman, piled up to her silences,
waiting for what the world will only let her do.

An Indian woman, a rural woman has always eluded Jayanta Mahapatra, the life and activity of a woman. How does the day begin for her? How does her life? How does she arise and awake from her slumber? Arising and awaking, she starts cleaning, wiping the muddy floor of the mud house. The cattle are brought out from their sheds.

A tattooed, ghumtawalli, purdahwalli, what will she do in a world where poverty, hunger and scarcity of resources seem to be writ large? These speak it out miserably rather than her persona. She is just a menial being.

The day has begun, breaking the morning sea of silence, the dawn-break lighting it, but what lies it in store for the Indian woman, the Indian village woman living in the country?

The dawn when it lights up, focuses upon, dazzles, the home keeper if late in rising feels for being late. The dawn knocks not like some stranger or rings the bell of the gate but focuses into the room through the pores and the holes.

The poem establishes him as a great poet of vague and shadowy reflections and vacant thinkings. He can go nowhere barring light and darkness.

An age gone by, replete with memories can only be recollected in tranquillity. Our journey is from silence to silence. All our pathways come out of and go back to finally wherefrom are we.

The bells sounding, casting an impact have a story of own which but science will tell it about at variance with religion which for what. 

The riddles of life and the world, of creation and Nature, how to unriddle them, the puzzles, the crosswords?

The dawn is a curtain-lifter, a window-peeper.

As our poses, postures and photographs tend to be with different resolutions and impressions so are the images and pictures of dawns coming each day with the realms of its own. Let us see what he says in this Dawn. Uncommon thoughts and ideas dot the poem running smoothly. It is very difficult to say what it is concrete and what not. 

Yeats’ An Acre of Grass is the story, The Lake Isle of Inn is free to see. There is a pleasure in viewing a misty morning, a foggy one when we appear to be shadows, nothing visible, to be steered clear. The shroud mist sometimes engulfs it around during the winter. The fog seems to be hanging over. And it grows opaque, shadowy.

Dawn

The foothills are quiet, it’s another day.
A new mist chokes the trees.
A sky of silence,
meaningless as man’s hatred,
as grass upon graves,
comes out in the sun.

Over the uneven fields of this land
an empty hand of God
strokes the smooth skin of light.
Perhaps his dreams 
are slowly destroying a universe.

Things are only going their way.
The dawn appears headless again.
The child has already come to know,
from who knows whom,
that peace has gone, never to return.

The foothills survive.
Footsteps of a few who walked on them
are silent.
Only grass, with ancient heavy foot
has stayed behind
in the frail shelter of that sound.

The poet tells the archetypal tales. The goer will go, what it had to stay has stayed, something as a relic, something as a remnant thereof. The green grass will keep covering up with its sheet which is but the course of nature. All about the thud and fall of the ancient gumboots, the dew-laden grass will tell of. Man as a passer-by will go away. The ways of the world as these were, and these will continue to be in future, as well.

But apart from lull and silence which pervades the poetic spirit, there is something of cockcrow seen in terms of peace lost, unrest growing. We do not know if he hints towards something.

None can say it what he will, where will he take to and dump us? Such is the story of nothingness.

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