Special Edition: Rajnish Mishra

Rajnish Mishra

Abstract Concretized

What are you? 

At first, I’m a little irritated, 

as I must answer that question 

and I’ve barely known you for a minute.

I think that you are a piece of burnt 

metallurgical coke, painted dirty yellow. 

If only, 

I could close the description here! 

As I gaze at you, I discover 

the outlines of an athletic male’s torso 

hidden within your folds: 

two shoulders, a taut neck with a prominent 

Adam’s Apple – that made me declare it male, 

and a tapering waistline justifies ‘athletic’.

Now I ask: Who are you? 

Shall I confidently declare you an abstract 

human torso? Your invisible face kind of half-smiles 

and I know by the twinkling in your imagined eyes 

that it’s not so simple. Are you a fragment of 

that statue in the male Shelley’s poem: 

the mighty Ozymandias? Ah, I’m not sure!

Are you Achilles? For long have we made 

your shield in our mind – the shield that 

Hephaestus made as Thetis stood marvelling. 

Twice, we’ve enough details on it to make 

it twice from the scratch. 

The mighty Achilles, then? Ah, I’m not sure! 

You must be someone important, I’m sure. Or else, 

why would they set you with a museum 

base and put you at display, for visitors to observe 

with rapt attention? Yet, the question remains:

What are you? Who are you?

***

 

Lines Ekphrastic

Observe a work of art, then make 

another. It’s a feat of the intellect; 

a linguistic exercise. It’s ekphrasis. 

It’s a place where visual meets literal. 

It’s the sum total of ‘n’ moments 

of abstract creation concretized on 

page or screen, or of the concrete 

translated into abstract, then to concrete again. 

Its roots go deep, long back 

into the pages of history, drawn up to 

that denouncer of the poetic art, 

the banisher of poets from the Republic. 

Works of art, painted or sculpted, 

inspire poets: the father artificer’s master artifice, 

the young master’s Grecian Urn, and this piece 

in your hands come to my mind, and few questions: 

Why is it done? What does the poet want?

To make the object of attention appear 

sublime maybe, to improve on reality, possibly, 

to bring the immense powers of the reader’s 

mind into play, probably. To force the posterity

to compare the description with the described 

one day, with the second creation that sometimes 

comes centuries after the first.

***

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Setu, June 2025