O.P. Bhatnagar is a poet of a different order as because apart from being ironical and satiric, he is a poet of social reality and this absurd living of ours. He is unsentimental and unemotional about the poetry of struggle, suffering and hardcore realities he writes about. He is a poet of thoughts and ideas. Protest poetry forms the base of his poetics. Nihilism, skepticism, and bleak hope form the core-content of his poetry. How does it break? The mud plaster too reveals the story behind, so is the roof telling a tale.

The houses of silence, men in silence, and as thus we go on making, meaning, searching for sound and speech intelligible to us. The dwellings of man, the habitats of his are the things. Who inhabits and who deserts? How?

Here the poet applying his poetic vision tries to write down a new line and length. Silence speaks has a narrative of its own kind.

The Speaking Silence is from Bhatnagar’s Shadows in Floodlights. The poet means to say that silence speaks the depth of speech it is made of. Every man is a deserted hut speaking the tale. Whose thought who is relaying? Eyes peep out through. What is the meaning and who interprets it as what; how to say it?

Everything is but a thought making a way into the realms, and something ruffles it down to make it say about. Had it been not, how would the speech come from the depths of silence? We just go on creating and re-creating out of. Have you studied, what the deserted huts say, communicate to, the huts of men and civilizations? How did the things come into existence and for what? What were the things elemental in having them or letting out?

But thoughts once created never end and as deserted huts they appear to be even though men are not in them.

Every silence defines the depth of speech
Of which it is made,
Every man a deserted hut
To speak.
Silence takes nothing
To create words sweat for
Man nothing
Silence to labor for.
The tired apartness of life.
May make one come close to silence
A deserted hut is made of
To hear it speak in silence
Much that was unspoken
And much that was lost to speech.

The mud plaster holds the hands
That stuck it there
The roof the vision the eyes located
Through chinks.
Once it was a thought
Inhabited by someone.
But its desertion hasn’t made it lonely.
For thought once created
Is never deserted:
Only its silence becomes more vocal.