Hoshang Merchant is India’s pre-eminent voice of gay liberation. Born in 1947 to a Zoroastrian business family in Bombay, India, he graduated in 1968 with a major in English and a minor in the culture of India. On his mother’s side, he descends from a line of preachers and teachers. He holds a Master’s from Occidental College, Los Angeles, USA. At Purdue University, Indiana, USA, he specialized in the renaissance and modernism. After leaving Purdue in 1975, Merchant attended the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Centre, Massachusetts, USA, and lived and taught in Heidelberg, Iran, and Jerusalem. He has studied Buddhism at the Tibetan Library, Dharamsala, India, as well as Islam in Iran and Palestine. Since 1979, seventeen of his books of poetry have been published. He recently superannuated from the University of Hyderabad, India, after twenty-six years of teaching.
Ajanta
For Said bin Mohamed
Hyderabad artist
All art is local
Vlaminck, Russian artist
Repeating something makes you own it:
A child's thrown ball
Mother's picking it up
Artists copying Ajanta over and over
They want to own mastery
2
The cave is dark
A lit match
Whites of eyes dart out of darkness
A world recedes
A world is born
Out of black comes all colour
Here the monks imagine
The repeated lives it took
To make a Buddha
Bird, beast, fish, flower
Padmapani holds a flower
A moment of a day
His eyes pools of compassion
Our bodies brands afire
A lit match
Eyes dart out
Lover, sage, master, artist
Art is what is made
Darkness
A light out of darkness
I must find the midnight clew
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