Prosopis, from which the name of the proposed Journal is derived, is the State-tree of Rajasthan and has a mushroom growth on the foothills of the Aravali Ranges. The tree has succeeded in withstanding the odds by requiring considerable drought hardiness. It is above all, a legume and it improves soil fertility. There is a popular saying in Rajasthan that death will not visit a man even at the time of a famine, if he has a Prosopis, a goat and a camel, since the three together would sustain him under the most trying conditions.
Naming a Journal and that, too, of poetry and creative writing after a tree is not a mathematical calculation but an algebraic constant. For what can be more perennial than a tree, than poetry for, after all, a tree is a poem in the same way as a poem is a tree despite the fact that a tree is a tree and a poem, just a poem. A tree grows and itself knows not as to what shape, what size, what form it will take. So also does grow a poem. Both grow on their own and yet grow as if it is nothing of their doing, as if it is all the performance of a Leela. The Rig Vedic Rishis, aeons ago, had realised that the earth rose out of a tree:
In the midst of a de-culturalised world when old values and samskaras are fast being wiped away, the only sustaining force can be found in poetic creativity which can serve as a soothing shade to rest under for a number of human lives lost in the burning, burning vastness illimitable !
Man, after all, is a creative animal but the worldliness of the world which he has woven around himself seems to have devoured his creative potential and marred his poetic sense. Indifference and insensitivity are a contagion spreading like an epidemic and eating up our spiritual selves. We are becoming the unassembled parts of a super-computer or robotics : a childhood is a manipulated status paradigm, the youth is all an engineered affair and life, per se, is no longer a journey but a Speed-2 or Dhoom-2 race. In Beckettian terms, we are the lost ones caught in a glass cylinder and waiting for a crack in the transparent wall.
Prosopisia, so we hope and believe, will bring about that crack, and
make the caged souls free for as Nietzsche in a fit of spiritual deevangi
exhortingly cried out-’Create a world out of the hell that is in you !’ .
Prosopisia
You cannot kill a prosopis.
When you see one, you
sweat away the remoteness of a was.
A has been suddenly evaporates.
Simply mews in womb, a shall be, unheard almost.
You become one and feel,
lying under becoming the shadow itself.
A dilution. Dilation, too.
The shadow grows a wet tongue licks up the tired feet.
Prosopis is an eternal wait-
lone and alone with sparse shade ragged waiting with half-open ye...
The shadow is a plasmic jade in a sulphuric sun.
A covenant between a sky green and yet not-so-green and the dusty dunes.....
It is a wish wistful--a hope against hoping in the vast expanses
of timeless deserts... green time in the midst of ungreened eternity--an audacious urge, an impudent process caught by its forelock.
A sage performing penance for the uncommitted, un-owned sins.
The initials, nay- the thumb mark of a ‘bhaya’ back from his master’s paddocks.
It is peace that passeth scorching heat--a splash of little coolness--
a mint-mermaid dancing among the fire-flames...
nainum chindanti shastrāni nainum dahati pavakah...
Anuraag
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A.R.A.W.LII,
Ajmer. All Rights Reserved.