Jagdish Prakash

       www.educomp.com

Jagdish Prakash works for a company engaged in education field in a senior position. He writes poetry in Urdu and English. He has already published five books of poems in Urdu. His collection of English poems has also be published in 2012. Three of his collections of Urdu poems have been awarded by the Urdu Academy, Delhi, India for excellence in the field of Urdu Literature. His Urdu ghazals have been set to music and sung by the late Yunus Malik, a renowned composer and singer. An album of his poems, composed and sung by Kavita Seth, a well-Known playback singer, has been released by Universal Music.

About his poetry, Jagdish says,” Writing poetry is not my vocation, nor my everyday routine. But the reality which exists beyond the cliched reality of everyday existence, evokes images and metaphors playing on emotions, feelings, passions, memories, delights, frustrations, unrequited desires which get expressed in words. These words get expression through my poems.” 

Alien Moments

The days are depressed,

The nights are turbulent,

A dialogue of centuries occurs

In the union of moments,

A procession of memories

Descend on the threshold,

Of lost events,

The universe is lost

On the track of incidents,

The headgear of circumstance

Is on the head of life,

Turmoil of breath

Is on the entrance of life,

manuscripts of night are scattered

On the table of silences,

The ominous shadows are perching

On the windows,

Strange are the scenes,

Anomalous are the airs,

The steps are faltering,

The winds are wobbling,

Symbolic of time,

These all portend

Something will happen,

Perhaps the spectacle will change,

If it doesn’t happen so,

Then time may go away !

Someone should to this night impart,

Whenever it is about to depart,

It should proceed knocking my shut door,

So that I should go

Farther and farther away,

Holding the finger

Of the approaching day.

Written by Jagdish Prakash

Translated from Urdu

–

An Epistle of Love

When you had been with me, 
Waterfalls sprouted, 
From the frozen mountains, 
And they spread in the valleys, 
On the dormant grasslands, 
The stubborn winds sprawled 
Their feet on the velvety carpet of dew 
And amphitheater of passions 
Was wrapped in the concert of fragrances. 

Since you have gone apart, 
Thousands of waterfalls, all of sudden 
Have begun to flow through veins 
Of speckled body in parched wilderness. 

Since you have gone to the alien land, 
All cascades have contracted 
To the rocky mountain of my mind, 
And winds faraway in the sky 
Have been embellishing your name 
All of sudden there have scattered 
Abruptly, thousands of roses, 
On the faded sheet of passions. 

Anonymous rustling sounds clinging 
On the curtains of my silent room, 
Question me about the past conversation 
With the crickets and cadence 
Of some acquainted voice 
Which has faded away amid the chinks 
Of shut windows; touching and playing 
With scattered neem-fruit in the yard, 
Then there remains behind nothing, 
Even to the farthest end… nothing 
The moon has lost itself 
In the moisty islands of eyes, where haunting 
Strands of Hamant remain echoing, 
And in the half opened windows, 
When did the sun show up, 
Upon the tiny drops of sweat? 
I know not. 

Written by Jagdish Prakash 
Translated from Urdu