What an excellent proposition, an excellent supposition of fire being nailed by the wall and the sorrows by the stars! In O.P. Bhatnagar’s poetry, there is some pain and anguish to be felt at the inner level, the burden of grief hangs it heavy upon. Sorrow strikes us. Truth is always different and hidden and reality far from.  Reality is ever ready to give a lick of dust. Where is it happiness, say you? Hope for a good living is but a dream. How to say when will it happiness dawn upon? When shall we be happy? None can say it. Happiness is but a mirage.

To read him is to read with a heavy heart. He is a poet of faded dreams and luster bereft of. We get down from the stars to the earth. Bhatnagar does not let us keep soaring into up above, high into the skies. Living on earth, he cannot think of star wars. His is poetry of social protest, silent suffering as has been ordained by fate. There is something of absurd drama drawn from in him. Social reality is far from. How difficult is it to live it here and struggle and suffer and to eke out a living? Hardcore realities make us lick dust letting us a toilsome life full of struggle and suffering.

O.P. Bhatnagar is not a dreamer in verse but is a realist.  He knows what it is personal suffering, loss and tragedy. False promises cannot show us a dawn. Hardships come into life, never let off simply and these need to be overcome. At the time when grief comes inflicting deaf and dumb, few standby during those moments of pain. The time is hard and full of suffering. When was it not? The destiny of man is as such. To bear the brunt is our time. We are here for to bear silent suffering. Whom to complain against? Where to lodge the complaint? Who the giver of pains?  We cannot say why we suffer and for what and nobody can say it why is suffering there in our life.

He too wants to win over the love and heart of Helen, but is Helen in his lot? Where to debunk the ships of Troy? Where to devastate the ships? He thinks of living by future, which is yet to come, but how will it be none can guess it about. Whom we think saints are not as they appear to be coming from different places. This is a time when we get misled, gone astray. What are morals? A bundle of contradictions is it. Immortal is but mortality. Can we be immortal? Can anything on earth be? Ghosts seem to be sitting around the desolate ramparts of time, leaving not behind, walking past, following behind as the shadows cast around.  Can we dislodge the ghost of the past? What it our past? How the past of man? How the story of suffering? Why do all of us suffer? Who is good? How much is he good?

A man lives by his visions so are that of his. But how will it be the future? None can say it.

Tragedy, struggle, suffering and pain are the main things of his poetry. His is a type of social poetry. Life has taught him otherwise making him tread on the dusty ways.

Can fire be nailed by the wall?
And sorrows by stars?
Drowsy hopes bite off
Half the facts of their truth
And render dreams a tragic boast.
The lost years of hoped for happiness
Are winter logged
And the glories of our ancestors
A lived out past
The horizons of the present haunt with desolation
And reek of cancerous corruption in bones.
Talking in the rhetoric of sleep
The future looks faded
Like the blooms of cacti after dawn.
The saints from bars, brothels and nightclubs
Tasting of casinos and underworld
Turn morals, values and virtues to ice cream
Licked by fun loving children in cones.
Immortal as mortality I wander like a ghost
On the ramparts of desolate times
Unable to relieve the past
Or feast on the present in high robes.
Wish burning a thousand Troys
To win a Helen
I live for a future
That nails me by my visions
In the dark.

Nailing By The Wall by O.P. Bhatnagar is one of the poems included in Thought Poems published in 1976.