Thanatos

“And, Penelope,
Thanatos, the brother of Hypnos will come for me
From the sea
At the end of my long life
As the ghost of Teiresias has already told me
At the entrance of the Underworld.”

I’m not Odysseus, but

I’ve sailed my own seas and completed
My quota of journeys as a mortal
And you’re not Penelope either, but
I have to tell you how
I have my premonition of the bone-chilling darkness
I’ll enter soon
For my life to me seems already too long
And the black hour is approaching

Dilip Chitre

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 INDIA Feature Contributors

Bhisham Bherwani’s poetry volume The Second Night of the Spirit

was published by CavanKerry Press. He completed his undergraduate
and graduate studies at Cornell University and New York University,
respectively. He has received fellowships from the Frost Place, Salton-
stall Foundation for the Arts, Ucross Foundation, and the Jentel Artist
Residency Program. He lives in New York City.
Dilip Chitre (1938–2009) was a poet, a filmmaker, and a painter. He
wrote in both English and Marathi. His translations of Tukaram’s devo-
tional poetry were published as Says Tuka (Penguin, 1991). His selected
poems in English, As Is, Where Is, and his selected English translations
of his Marathi poetry, Shesha, were published in 2007 (Poetrywala).
Keki Daruwalla’s Collected Poems: 1970–2005 (Penguin India) was
published in 2006. His poetry volume Landscapes won the 1987 Com-
monwealth Poetry Prize. His historical novel For Pepper and Christ was
shortlisted for the 2010 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. He lives in Delhi.
Kamala Das (1934–2009) published several books of poetry and prose
in both English and Malayalam.
Eunice de Souza is a retired Head of the Department of English at St.
Xavier’s College, Mumbai, where she taught for thirty years. A volume
of her complete poems, A Necklace of Skulls, was published in 2010
(Penguin India). She has published two novellas and several volumes
of research on nineteenth and twentieth-century writing in English; she
has also written for children.
Nissim Ezekiel (1924–2004), a recipient of the Padma Shree Award, was
instrumental in the development of the practice of composition of poetry
in English in India. The second edition of his Collected Poems (OUP
India) and a critical volume of his writings, Nissim Ezekiel Remembered
(Sahitya Akademi), edited by Havovi Anklesaria and Santan Rodrigues,
were posthumously published in 2005 and 2008, respectively.
Adil Jussawalla, the editor of the seminal anthology New Writing in
India (Penguin, UK, 1974), was born in Bombay in 1940. He is the
author of three books of poems: Land’s End (1962), Missing Person
(1976), and Trying to Say Goodbye (2011). His poems have previously

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.