I am always in suspended animation
Unaware of a thousand things
But I am happy
Gods don’t mind my imperfections.
Dr. Jernail Singh Anand, a renowned poet and writer from Chandigarh, India, shares his poetry
Dr. Jernail Singh Anand, based in Chandigarh, is an Indian poet and scholar credited with 170 plus books of English literature, philosophy and spirituality. He won great Serbian Award Charter of Morava and his name adorns the Poets’ Rock in Serbia. He was honored with Seneca Award LAUDIS CHARTA by Academy of Arts & Philosophical Sciences, Bari, Italy 2024. He is Founder President of the International Academy of Ethics and conferred Doctor of Philosophy (Honoris Causa) by University of Engineering & Management, (UEM) Jaipur. Email anandjs55@yahoo.com
Biblio-link: https://sites.google.com/view/bibliography-dr-jernal-singh/home
SCRIPT
Who will meet whom
And who will say what
When they appear
And when disappear.
When someone dies,
They bury him
And cry for sometime
But do they really die?
We find them in a different role
In another serial
Here too they have
A script of their own.
It is an added advantage
To characters of a film
Or a drama,
They hold a script.
A script which is
Written by someone
To highlight their character
They cannot utter a word of their own.
Am I a part of the cosmic spectacle
And how deficiently placed?
I have no script
Rather, I have to extemporize.
I also do not know
When my role will end
How it will end
And when it will end.
Did I come unscripted
Was what I did extemporize
My own script?
What I thought my freedom was it a fad?
I am always in suspended animation
Unaware of a thousand things
But I am happy
Gods don’t mind my imperfections.
They only examine my intentions
They judge me by my actions
And the first and the last
Measure is if I am honest:
Whether I did whatever I did
In fear of the judgement day
If I was after goodness
And if I added to the joys of the earth.
***

SOMETHING SO SPECIAL
I saw so many fruit cut and decorated
In my plate
And when I ate them
I found myself unimpressed.
I had smuggled the fruit in
But like contraband
They did little by way of health
To my body
For, they were only clay images
Meant for models for students
Not to be eaten
Nor meant to satisfy my need.
It was a bad experience,
With words too, so many in my plate
Decorated but when eaten
Failing to give any sense of purpose
What if I eat and eat something
And it does not satisfy my hunger?
What use are these food stuffs?
My mouth was munching
Stomach was receiving something
Yet the body felt denied
The joy and the juice of operation eat.
I do not leave a story without writing
Its moral
So that when you read it
It goes to your head
And makes a lucid interval
I do not believe in summoning
Words which believe in a false narrative
I do not allow words the freedom
To fly and perch where they like
So long as they are in my poem
They cannot misbehave
They once made a plea
For freedom of thought and movement
Words wanted to mean what they wanted
Not what the poet wanted them
To speak and stand for
Words when spoken become Gita
And when written become the Quraan
Freedom to move and fly from the holy text
May lead them into drains of unholy waters
Words, learn discipline
Learn to mean what the poet wants you to
One cannot treat words like birds
Shoot them and then cook them
It is not meet to make
Clay models of words,
Words cannot be denied their meaning
Nor their penchant to grow,
Yet words must understand the patterns
In which the poet has forced them
And made them mean something so special.
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