POETRY & LITERATURE

HERO CUP FINAL

elinepa

kapildev 

 by Dennis Dinopoulos*

Where was I walking to?

Where was I running to in these wide and sprawling streets? 

The night thick, aromatic. 

I was caught in the midst this incredible current, 

pushed along by sheer excitement, pumped by 

an expectancy higher than the buildings enclosing me. 

I was immersed in these invisible, intense, electrifying

deregulators, together with fellow disembodied spirits 

on the way to life’s cradle, where potion is bequeathed 

so that life my arrive at its preordained pinnacle of perfection.

 

This was nirvana experienced at the feet of what was once 

an adopted God, created for the purpose of leisure, 

but Who had since, grown in stature, with its perfectly 

attuned slips, unpredictable wickets, rivaling even those 

from heaven inherited, offering through static obedience 

a way beyond all differences and into that 

open ground of deliverance. 

 

The divine ground. All day it had been brewing, this unseeing, 

ungraspable, indefinable ecstatic bliss, palpitating as much as 

an undercurrent of suppressed infernos, as one overlaying 

neutralizer of all differences, in the name of one common goal: 

To defeat the enemy.  

 

Thin, vibrating voices of radio commentators pierced the thick, 

aromatic night; the whole mental human space seemed like 

one huge acoustic ear listening to what silence may interpret 

in and above the exactness of description, now in the form of a run, 

now in the shape of ‘leg before wicket’. The whole city was listening; 

feverish, in agony, all with their transistors glued to their ears 

praying for Kepil Dev to strike, as I hurried to Eden Gardens. 

  

* Dennis Dinopoulos composed this poem during his visit to Calcutta in 1993 when the ‘Hero Cup’ Cricket Final between India and South Africa was taking place.  

Poems by Dennis Dinopoulos published in Indika: