Siddhartha Tripathy
In the service of poetry, some draw upon their unique and rich life experiences, some employ their vivid and fertile imagination, and some exploit their facility for words and rhyming to great effect. Great poems, not least the highly engaging ones, often have a perfect mix of experience, perception, imagination and craft.
“Another Summer Afternoon”, a recently published poem by Bishnupada Sethi, is one such.
Delightfully simple in its structure but deeply profound in its essence, the five-stanza poem takes the reader through a wide gamut of emotions in a rather narrow span of time.
The introductory pair of verses paint a beautifully dreamy picture from the poet’s childhood reminiscence, with natural elements like “lines of tall palm trees” and “azure blue sky” backgrounding his unbridled positivity and “restless” anticipation.
The middle stanza evokes a sense of nightmarish horror as a flash of lightning shows the dark side of Mother Nature, “shattering the earth with loud thunder and shock waves”.
The “fumes billowing” from a tall tree set “ablaze” reflect the sense of shock, fear and helplessness that the poet felt as a child in the moments after the event.
The penultimate stanza ushers in the poet’s mother as a protective force with a “soft call” and “kind face” that evinced “no fear, no pain” despite betraying some anxiety. The verse is written so delicately that readers can vicariously experience the author’s emotional shift from sheer fear to pure relief.
The concluding verse makes for the most heart-warming part as the poet and the reader together come to realise – and appreciate – the incredible things that mothers unflinchingly do for their children.
The greatness of “Another Summer Afternoon” perhaps lies in the perspective that it leaves lingering in reader’s mind long after being read.
Also, suffice to say, Sethi – a 1995-batch IAS officer of Odisha cadre, who is currently serving as Principal Secretary of the state’s higher education department – has taken his standing as a poet to new heights with his latest work of art.
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