Obituary poem by a.k ramanujan

A.K Ramanujan- Poet Introduction

A.K. Ramanujan whose full name is Attipate Krishnaswami Ramanujan was an Indian poet, scholar, linguist, philologist, folklorist, translator, and playwright. He wrote predominantly in the English and Kannada languages.

He is a recipient of the Padma Shri award, the MacArthur Fellowship, and the Sahitya Akademi Award (awarded posthumously for his poetry collection “The Collected Poems”).

‘Obituary’, a poem by A.K. Ramanujan was published in his poetry collection “Relationships” in 1971.

Obituary poem by A.K. Ramanujan

Father, when he passed on,
left dust
on a table of papers,
left debts and daughters,
a bedwetting grandson
named by the toss
of a coin after him,

a house that leaned
slowly through our growing
years on a bent coconut
tree in the yard.
Being the burning type,
he burned properly
at the cremation

as before, easily
and at both ends,
left his eye coins
in the ashes that didn’t
look one bit different,
several spinal discs, rough,
so