|
KABITA
I shall highlight here some prominent features of ancient Oriya
poetry, which is not different from other Indian poetry in its essence and spirit. For this I have taken into account the
poetry of fifteenth century to nineteenth century A.D., starting from Sarala Das of Mahabharata fame to the mystic
poet Bhima Bhoi. Strangely, almost all the poets of these 400 years were spiritual seekers; they belonged to one or other
path of Indian spirituality. They were seekers, saints, bhaktas, tantrics and mystics. But they did not express their
experience just as an intellectual or philosophical concept, they converted it to living poetry, full of vitality and beauty,
so that it could be received by the readers aesthetically.
Prior to fifteenth century, there were a series of poetical compositions,
called Charyapada, composed by Buddhist Siddhacharyas. They were practitioners of esoteric Tantrism of Sahaja Jana.
Here I am giving an example from the poet Kanhupad of tenth century :
Your hut stands outside the city
Oh, untouchable maid
The bald
Brahmin passes sneaking close by
Oh, my maid, I would make you
my companion
Kanha is a kapali, a yogi
He is naked and has no disgust
There is a lotus with sixtyfour petals
Upon that the maid
will climb with this poor self and dance.
Here the image ‘untouchable maid’ is used for ‘ shakti’,
it resides outside the city, i.e., outside the ordinary consciousness. Though she is untouchable, the bald Brahmin, meaning
the so-called wise man, has a secret hankering for her. But only a kapali or an extreme Tantric can be a fit companion
for her, because he is also an outcaste ; he is naked, for he does not have any social identity or artificiality. After the
union with the shakti both of them would climb on the 64-petalled lotus Sahasrara Chakra, and dance there.
Evidently, the poet had drawn images and symbols from existing social milieu,
social psychology, so that this deep realization could be easily grasped by the readers. This kind of poetry, full with the
mystery of Tantra, spread over the Northeastern region of India from the tenth to the fourteenth century, and its style of
expression was revived by the Oriya poets of sixteenth to nineteenth centuries.
Oriya poetry with a distinct language started with Sarala Das of fifteenth
century who was acclaimed as “Adikabi” or the first poet. He is also a Shudra Muni, or a seer from
backward class. He had no formal education and did not know Sanskrit. It is believed that he got his poetic gift from goddess
Sarala (Sarasswati), and wrote Mahabharata as it was dictated by her. Among many of his poems and epics, he
is best remembered for his Mahabharata. Though he took the original theme of Vyasadev, he departed from it in many
ways and aspects. He visualized the Mahabharata in the atmosphere of Orissa, created many life situations peculiar
to Orissa. Here Kunti is called Koenta, Draupadi is Drupati, Yuddhisthira is Jujesthi, Duryodhana is Managobindai –
so that characters will seem familiar and closer to the imagination of common people. From many original episodes I give here
two examples, which are not found in Vyasa’s Mahabharata.
When Yuddhisthira lost everything, including his wife Draupadi, in the game
of dice with Sakuni, Duhsasana dragged her to Kurusabha, by pulling her loose, luxuriant hair. He wanted to make her a slave
and tried to take away her clothes. Fortunately, Krishna heard her prayer and saved her from this utter humiliation. But an
enraged and revengeful Draupadi took a terrible vow, that her hair would remain loose and unbraided till she could wash it
with Duhsasana’s blood. After killing him in the war, Bhima brought his blood for Draupadi, and she washed her hair
with it, licking it even as it flowed down her face. This is the image of Mahakali of Indian spirituality, who takes
delight in killing Asuras and drinking their blood. Thus Draupadi is painted here as a very strong woman, who believes
in defending her honour and dharma by destroying the Asuric forces.
Another episode is in the last phase of the Kurukshetra war. All
the Kauravas and great warriors like Karna, Drona, Sakuni are dead. Duryodhana, alone and panic-stricken, finds himself beside
a long, deep river of blood. Innumerable dead bodies are floating there. Duryodhana cries a lot, catches hold of corpses one
by one, and tries to sit on one in order to cross the river. But as soon as he sits, it sinks to the bottom of the river.
Finally, with the help of a solid, strong body he crosses the river. On the other side, he discovers that it was the dead
body of his son Laxman. Absolutely frustrated, he weeps, embraces his son’s corpse, remembers his glory and also remembers
how Laxman requested him to give at least five villages to the Pandavas. So he repents : “Now I promise to give them
half of my kingdom, please come back to life, my son.”
This incident makes one conscious of the consequences of an egocentric,
ambitious, self-assertive way of life. Besides these two, there are many more original episodes, which contribute a lot to
Indian culture.
The poet Jagannath Das of late fifteenth century was a scholar, philosopher
and a bhakta. He had given a new language to Orissa, which was almost sanskritised and it is presently spoken
and written by Oriyas. There is a story regarding the translation of the Sanskrit Bhagavata into Oriya. At that time
religious scriptures being in the custody of Sanskrit pundits, fees were collected from the villagers who wanted to listen
to their discourses. One day, Jagannath Das’s mother was denied entry to the discourses of Bhagavata, as she
did not have enough money. Greatly moved by the incident, Jagannatha translated it into Oriya for his own dear and Krishna-devoted
mother, thereby helping the whole of Orissa to enjoy the privilege of reading their most favourite scripture of Hindu dharma.
Afterwards, Bhagabata tungis or study circles were founded in each village of Orissa, where people of all classes would
come and listen : even the illiterate womenfolk and children were not left out.
Even though it is a translation, Jagannath made it quite original by his
poetic genius. It is composed in Nabakhari, which means that each line consists of nine letters. An example will show
the difference between the original and the translation. The original text in Vyasa (Chapter I, Book I) reads :
The fruit of Bhagavata has fallen from the tree of
Vedic literature
It is sweet with the nectar of Suka’s mouth
Oh, the men of great sensibility of the world
Drink this and attain Divine Delight.
As is well know, though Vyasa wrote the Bhagavata, his son Sukadeva
was its propagator. In Oriya and Sanskrit, “Suka” means parrot. Hence, the metaphors of tree and fruit are justified.
In the Oriya version, these four lines have been expressed in fourteen lines ; Bhagabata is read in Oriya in a melody
of this sort :
“All the Vedas became a tree
And bore a fruit in the vast space
As the fruit ripened, it fell down
Suka the parrot came
flying to the spot,
Leaving the company of friends
He drank the juice of the fruit
From his mouth flows it
Sweeter than nectar
Oh men of great sensibility
Drink this and attain Divine Delight.”
We can see how, without hampering the purity of the original, he had
conveyed more with fresh, pictorial images.
The chapter Rasa-lila in the tenth Book of Bhagabata is a
magnificent piece of poetry, just as in the eleventh Book Krishna’s message to Uddhaba, before leaving his body, has
become a masterpiece in Jagannath’s able hand. In a full-moon night of autumn, Krishna calls his devotees, the Gopis
with his magic flute. The Gopis, the married cowherd women of Gopa, come running, leaving their marital status and their home,
leaving all the barriers of society and tradition of ages. And Krishna dances in Brindavan, near the river Yamuna, under fragrant
Kadamba trees so lovingly, so passionately that each and every Gopi thinks that Krishna is dancing with herself alone
: 16,000 Krishnas appear to be dancing with 16,000 Gopis. Thus, Krishna’s devotees who aspired to get him as a lover
were delivered from earthly bondage by this love play. The entire scene of sensuous, love play has been transmuted into a
piece of beauty – it would not be exaggerated to say that by sheer force of poetry, Jagannath made the eternal Brindavan
descend on earth : it becomes real and vivid for one who reads with humility and devotion. On Sri Krishna’s birthday,
every Oriya reads the chapter Balalila and, on his deathbed, listens to the eleventh Book.
The theme of Radha-Krishna dominated the field of Oriya poetry for the next
300 years. A versatile poet, Upendra Bhanja of seventeenth century, was an exception who wrote epics and poems in new and
imaginary themes, such as his epic VaidehishaVilas, composed on Rama and Sita. Each line of the whole epic starts with
the letter ‘Ba” and is based on ragas, so that it can be sung and used in dance.
Then came the Vaishnava poets, like Abhimanyu Samanta singhar, Kabisurya
Baladev Rath, Banamali Das, Gopalakrisna and Bhaktacharan. Their poems are also a combination of song and dance. These are
called Odissi songs and are used in the world-famous Odissi dance. Students from abroad come to research on it and learn it.
Its significance lie in the deep emotion, of surrender, and ecstasy of union and pang of separation in Radha-Krishna’s
love.
In Bidagdha Chintamani, one of the best epics of the age, Abhimanyu
tries to give definition of this love through Bisakha, an intimate friend of Radha. Unable to bear the pain of separation,
Radha asks her friend about the criteria, quality and source of love. Bisakha replies :
“It is not fire
But it burns the body
It is not a weapon
But it pierces the heart
It
is not an intoxicant
But it intoxicates
It is not a fishing rod
But
attracts the fish of the mind.”
So, love, like Brahman of Indian spirituality, is “not this”
and “not that” – then what is it? Again she says :
“It is difficult to sustain this love
More difficult than climbing the sky
Than walking on the edge of sword
It is as if one tries
to catch air in a net
Or to hold mercury in one’s palm.”
It is a long and extraordinary poem written on love, which takes one
away from the limited to the limitless.
Expression of love has been more simple, refined with Baladev Rath, who
was honoured with a title of “Sun among the poets.” He is best in an unusual poetic structure, called Champu
– its first poem starts with the first letter of alphabet, “ka,” and it continues in that way till
the last poem, which starts with the last letter, “khya.” It is surprising to find such a beautiful dance
drama with a self-imposed regulation of form. Here is one of his poem, based on a raga, with a befitting rhythm or
taal, so that it can be used in dance :
In Bhakta Charan’s epic poem Mathura Mangala, through the Gopis’
love for Krishna, the poet proves the superiority of Bhakti Yoga to Jñana yoga After finishing a talking with them, Uddhaba
was overwhelmed by their sincerity, self-surrender and entire trust, and realized that Gopis had identified themselves completely
with Sri Krishna, so he is not worthy of consoling these enlightened souls.
Almost all the poets I have discussed here also composed many songs, as
prayers to their personal god or Krishna or to Jagannath, the presiding deity of Orissa. Indian spirituality never believes
God to be in heaven. God is one’s father, mother, teacher, son and friend. So the tone of all these prayers, or bhajans,
is very intimate. We see Balaram Das begging nothing from Jagannath except a handful of dust from his temple courtyard ; we
see Chandan Hajuri singing his glory, begging God’s grace, and Baladev Rath scolding him as much as he can ; by comparing
him with a poisonous snake – a Kala Sarpa who devours living beings – Bhktacharan exposes the crude reality
of the body’s death to make one conscious of the divine and transcend death. And there are also some heart-rending Bhajans
by a Muslim poet Selabega, which proves that at that time Bhakti for Jagannath was beyond religion.
But the mystic poets had no personal god, they were praying to a formless
being or void. The poet Achyutananda of sixteenth century conceived the creation of Brahman as such :
There was a place called non-void
It became the void in a strange way
In this void resides the formless
From the body of the
formless supreme Brahman embodied
Or, to express that state of Brahman experience, he says :
In the moonless night
Shines a full moon
In the eternal night a sun is seen
A lamp burns day and night here
And a wild wind kindles the lamp.
That is the kind of riddles and contradictory images which mystic poets
used to express their abstract experience and create situations full of ambiguity.
The last poet of this discussion is Bhima Bhoi of nineteenth century, who
belonged to tribal community – he is also called a saint-poet. His divinity is sunya or a formless, nameless
being called Anama, but sometimes he sees him as a renunciate, wearing yellow robes, roaming around the world in summer
and rain. He is never contented with his own salvation, he wants to uplift mankind to a spiritual height. At times he gets
very angry with the people for their folly, inertia, and ignorance, and at other times he becomes so compassionate that he
says :
“How can one tolerate the terrible suffering
and misery
of these living beings
Even if my life goes to hell
Let the world be saved.”
This is the ultimate message of Indian spirituality – to see the
Divine in his creation, to be united with it, to try to raise it – which is wonderfully expressed it Bhima Bhoi’s
poetry.
Have I told enough of my favourite and revered poets? I can now look back
to that age of 450 years ago, when there was no printing press, no electronic media and these poets were writing on palm leaves.
Some of them were uneducated, some were striving hard to earn their daily needs, some were dedicated Bhaktas or renunciates,
but all of them were highly talented, with a thorough knowledge of poetry, music and dance. They loved Orissa and its language,
they knew the people’s psychology and need, above all, they did not bother for name, fame or awards. They were immensely
popular, but never came down to the level of common herd ; instead, they touched their souls and lifted them to a higher level
of consciousness.
Should one not expect a little of this from modern-age artists, poets or
writers? Must art and literature be either for an enlightened few or be perverted and commercialized to have a widespread
mass appeal? It is a grave and serious point to ponder about. As stated by Sri Aurobindo :
“The greatness of a literature lies first in the
greatness and worth of its substance, the value of its thought and the beauty of its forms, but also in the degree to which,
satisfying the highest conditions of the art of speech, it avails to bring out and raise the soul and life or the living and
the ideal mind of a people, an age, a culture, through the genius of some of its greatest or most sensitive representative
spirits.”
Should not we want Indian poetry to become as great as it was?
Thank you.
THE AMBASSADOR
I have lost the accredition papers
My address is temporary
Any
house I live in
is my embassy under threat
Every man looks like a wily foreigner
For each language I ask for
a
translator,an interpreter
Every woman seems to be
a venom-maiden
How do I bathe,every river
vanishes at the sight
of my feet
The wind wafts past me
doesn't bring
the vintage scent of a country my own
Courts,benches,fields,camps
caves
and sanctums:
nowhere I meet my peer,
my "samanadharma"
Up there,perhaps,
the Master gets replaced
Who
really recalls the terms
of the last Treaty-of-Peace
Parleying over the new draft
I'm afraid
a Great War may blast
the
very next moment
I do not know the country
of which or to which
I'm the Ambassador:
an envoy-in-peril
At
every stride I get
more and more exiled
And every poem:
just a fragile pact
for a transient ceasefire
with
Time the Terrible
From BODHINABHA:THE SKYVISION
Smoke soars up
as water streams
down
it's natural
Not that smoke really uncapped
a bottle
and leapt into the shape
of a shrieking demon
all
of a sudden
it wasn't that way
Touching,patting,caressing
all-fingers
on the moving potters'-wheel
I was
playing
with moist clay
To shape the globe anew
grip over the hands
is a must
fire comes next
How
can art take birth
unless the hands waver?
Distortion
a cherished curse
Clay that enters a mould
and gets
out of it
remains mere clay
dead though shapely
I don't need moulds
Sweat,blood,sandalwood-paste
memory,being
and dreams
I blended into a dough
to keep the clay moist
braving the sun
Waiting for new distortions
of varied
ilks
My hands trembled
From the whirring wheel soared
a blue ascension
a lean column of incense
in cool
grace
Clay becoming smoke
who could have fancied?
Now I know
why the sky is blue
why sculpting
is so
cruel
Some day
the needletip of my blue smoke
will reach up to the sun
and,piercing it,
prick the sky to
etch
a new star
a red lone star
Had the colour of the smoke
been red
had the colour of the wet clay
been
red,ah,
at the beginning
of the beginning
THE SPRING
Halfknown,halfstranger
one
to the other
all of us
in spring time
Earth-crawling creeper
suddenly stands up
like a twisted goldstick
and
then shivers
The viewer gets numbed
Cruel her stare
like the breasts
of a girl in early teens
His eyes
get lowered
Buds of white thirst
sprout on tiny shoots
and yet
the root drinks fire
You,hot rock floor,
give
up your dream
of rising like a minar
melt and confess
the defeat
Thunder this time
shall not strike
though
sky
may collapse
Only a peacock-plume
dropping down and down
will touch tenderly
the tip of consciousness
of
the green shoots
at the top.
SATCHIDANDA RAUTROY
SEA My lost crown appears
to me
as I face the sea,
watch it rolling about on the sands.
And here my kingdom lies in shards,
enveloping me like a fortress
vast, and the limit's past.
I forget myself, forgetting my first name
in time to become my second self,
turning a stranger to myself,
aloof and unfamiliar.
In the sky of my own self
I lose myself, losing too
my beginning and my end:
the truth of all that was or wasn't, and is.
All words in an instant
turn wordless,
the word's past,
the unheard of what is heard.
All sounds seem meaningless,
the quest for all meaning futile.
Oh, if only these sounds unite
to become a signal, a sign or symbol
that would open
the entrance to a magical cave
at the touch of a finger...
To say, to know, to understand
Useless are these words and voices,
all the prepared prayers.
Translation :
Jayanta Mahapatra
GODDESS DURGA
She is the one who slays me,
moment by moment,
In the grove of casuarinas,
by the shores of the sea,
She is the one who slays me,
in the very last act of the play.
With every single gut of my blood
is woven a pattern of immense terror.
She is the one who slays me
hour by hour
In the white man's cemetry, or here.
She is the one who pushes me
down the abyss of death.
Drawing me with the beak of her gaze,
She slays me with the strands of her smile
Here within, or in some lonely river isle,
In an abandoned citadel.
And I live again, fall in love with her.
My Sumba-Nisumba existence only resembles her.
So she is a Goddess, for how else
Can she secure the slayed,
Death and love, with strings of slaughter;
Because love is death, her order ultimate.
And receiving and giving seem complete
when each other we annihilate.
She is the one who slays me
with eyes of murder,
Slays me in the cell of love,
Over a secret stairway,
or on some forgotten border,
For she is a Goddess:
truly she makes me hers
Under the pretense of worship,
each moment by moment
In every single act of the play.
Translation :
Jayanta Mahapatra
THE HOUSE
It's night.
It's cold.
What incredible fury of the blizzard !
An unbearable death
could break into this house
like a hungry wild cat.
Close the doors and windows.
It's better here,in this corner of the lounge
of this house.
The chairs, the carpet and the table do not talk.
Talk, sing, or do something
entirely petty and entirely unnecessary.
Or take a book, lie down, and do not speak.
Whatever you do today will have some meaning—
a mile-long sip from a teacup,
drawing in cigarette smoke and puffing it out,
the violin's sad melody—
whatever you do will have meaning,
whatever you do will clearly be better.
Close the windows and doors.
Let's build a pathway paved with echoes,
away from solidified mysteries,
and arrive at the abode that's our very own.
There, in that abode,
a single moment holds
the reflection of our whole familiar world.
In light's green effulgence,
and in darkness that contains
God knows how many layers,
the blue sky descends in dewdrops
into the abyss of consciousness.
Let's go then to the frontier
where all disquiet has ceased.
Let's go into the house
set apart for us
by God knows who.
Some day, however, those terrible paws
will break into the house.
Its doors and windows will fall apart.
Electricity will be switched off.
It will embezzle every single certitude
of my universe
and, then, disappear for ever.
This moment will be the moment
of all-devouring time
that has no beginning,
and no end.
Look, the black wild cat
is here once again.
Translation :
Ramakanta Rath
SATCHIDANDA RAUTROY
BIRTHDAY
Why must one live for one hundred years?
Bereft of the poison-tooth, defenceless,
and unable to lift one's own bow,
must one still live?
Why must one play host to one hundred autumns year after year
opening and closing and reopening and bolting again
the doors and windows?
Must one go on playing the same game for eternity,
keep on doing the same sum till infinity?
Who will be my witness:
the snippets of Vietnamese valour
from the pitiful daily newspaper
in between sips of milk-powdered tea,
that act like vitamins?
The old guileless photograph of the well-dressed
young man smiling with his bride,
preserved inside the glass cupboard,
that warms up one's strained nerves?
Or the "farewell-message"
presented with garlands of now-faded camphor
by the office-staff
on one occasion of a transfer from Bhadrak to Koraput,
displayed on the wall?
Thereafter the same formulae of multiplication
from one to twenty and from twenty to one,
framed photographs hung on dusty dark walls:
the eldest daughter donning the black gown and hood
and holding her diplomas,
the younger one doing her Odissi number.
And the picture, framed from a newspaper cutting,
of my dear lovabale son, unemployed,
arrested under MISA,
standing inside the police-cordon.
I can hear the bids of my daughters
trying their luck
in the matrimonial auction of the bridegroom-market.
What do they signify—
these basic ingredients of my world?
What do they stand for :
my tattered lungi and dirty vest and office-shirt?
A cake of soap is too costly, costlier is food;
it is only life that gets devalued day by day.
I do not want a boxful of birthdays, I don't.
One inch of life is all I ask for,
the inch-long life of a matchstick.
I feel I have all, yet nothing at all,
for the spark that ignites
is missing.
My wintry breath buries the cold sun
in the snow of slumber.
Still comes the heat wave,
and people die in Bihar
and people die in the north.
And people die of suicide in villages,
and they die without food.
But no one dies for the living.
No one waves his tattered shirt
soaked red in blood.
No one knows where food lies
except the rats and the intelligent ants
who dismiss humans as fools.
I begin my day with the steam
of the flavourless tea in the morning;
I retire at midnight with hollow dreams
in the much-mended mattress of silk.
Nightlong the lamp-post mocks at me.
In my courtyard blossoms the kadamba tree
from where my bicycle had been stolen
on a moonlit night.
Meanwhile I grow a day older
and wane a month upstream,
and then I drift through awakened slumber
towards the next birthday.
Why must one be so kind
to live for one hundred years?
And what does a birthday stand for :
to be or not to be
or non-being?
Translation :
Rajendra Kishore Panda
SEASHORE FAITH
The seashore of faith
is swept away
by the seven waves;
a speck of dust
is better than a vast void—
let the sand castle crumble
or its three shingle steps
be swept away,
the centre holds
life's magical flower,
faith's secret self.
Men may come
and then may go
but the primal truth
is left in footprints.
A sign
means a form
and also the formless,
the source
of soul and self
and the all-pervasive.
Translation :
Jayashree Mohanraj
GURUPRASAD MOHANTY
THE DOVES OF MY EYES
The doves of my eyes strike against
the steel of the sky,
and repulsed, return to earth,
where, each day you wait alone
to discover the many meanings of life and death.
When the words, with their little palms,
touch the body of the motionless sands,
running through the grey heat of noons
I seek ancestral memories in your flesh.
You whisper the secrets of leaf and grass,
of cliffs and woods, moss and shell,
in forlorn nights through the tatter of clouds
the myths of the moon sailing to its death.
As you retrieve the ruined body of April
drifting helplessly in the whirlpools of sand,
it seems you love me and want me to come,
but where is your soul? and where my body?
And when the doves of my eyes return,
ripping the sky's wrongs, it is time's river
that flows through the weariness of your flesh
and carries my dreams along.
Leaves fall, unheard, in the quiet noon,
and the sun respires in silence.
The pine forest pales like smoke in the sky.
And I don't remember when, the doves of my eyes
flew into Ujjain or Cuttack, pursuing you.
Translation :
Jayanta Mahapatra
LANDSCAPE
How could the gulmohur
preserve its redness
in the unceasing traffic
of automobiles?
At some nondescript moment
of some forever-lost century
this redness began its journey
from some first stirring of blood
to the April sunlight of today.
This summer day
heaps red dust on the road
meandering across the treeless hill.
Tyres of cars, buses, trucks and jeeps
and the chimneys of the steel plant
belch red dust all the time.
How then can the gulmohur
preserve its own redness?
I look out of the window
of the superfast bus
through my sunglasses
and try to comprehend
actual problems of the red colour
and its present-day motives and conduct.
Are my looks as stupid
as the look of
the superannuated old chairman
of the Enquiry-Commission
set up after the crowd
took out processions, burnt buses, and
was lathi-charged and fired upon?
From its origin in ether
the gulmohur's redness
has descended on the road.
How could redness continue to be red
amidst all this automobile traffic?
Where does this redness go
after the annihilation of its being?
Does it travel to a sad, disarrayed,
unsure and ravaged sunset
in some horizon?
Translation :
Ramakanta Rath
RAMAKANTA RATH
MURDER ON THE AGENDA
I know there is blood on my hands.
I further know my hands will be stained
with much further blood.
But to stand amidst the crowd
and throw bouquets on tyrants
was not my intention of coming here.
They will die someday. So will I.
And therefore, the restlessness of the night of unceasing rains
instils its wildness
into each of my days and each of my nights.
My life, clearly, is contingent on their death.
I shall no doubt die of the shame
of continuing to live unless they die quickly.
Unless they die quickly,
how shall I explain to the moon
the reason why my laughter has become a grimace ?
How shall I explain to that faraway woman
the reason why I turned into a stone?
If they kill me, they will surely manufacture a legend
to prove to people
that my death had become so necessary
that, as soon as I fell, voices in the sky
spoke, loudly and clearly,
their thanksgiving for the assasins.
Whether people believe them or do not
is for them an irrelevent matter.
They have never cared to understand
why citizens of this country pray everyday
that this life of theirs should be the very last
on this planet.
If, on the contrary, I kill them
it will be unnecessary to think up a story.
Even their own widows, in the course of their lament,
will never, never incite their children
to avenge the murder of their fathers.
And as soon as they die, I too shall go away.
But where? I have absolutely no idea.
Maybe that woman's face would lead me on like a star
to some place where the sword I had carried
to kill myself
would at once begin preparing itself
for someone else's murder.
Translation :
The Poet
A REQUEST TO THE DEAD
I offer this water to you,
my father, grandfather and great grandfather,
and to you, soldiers and generals
who fought for us and who fought against us
and who were killed by this war.
I stand here, on this battlefield,
and give this water and this rice to you—
you must be hungry and thirsty.
Ask for nothing
other than water and rice,
don't add to the long list
of things I was not able to give;
be content with this water and this rice
and return
to wherever you came from.
Consider this: the years
I have spent with you were many;
and this: it will not be long
before I join you wherever you sojourn.
Had I possessed things
other than this water and this rice,
would I have denied them to you
and asked you to return ?
Whatever I have
other than this water and this rice
are surely not appropriate offerings
for departed souls.
True, I traverse everyday of my life
with this baggage of witheld things,
but whenever I look at them
I disintegrate and cry out
with a voice that rends
the heavens
and the underworld.
Tears fill my eyes
when I make this offering
of water and rice.
I know, when my turn comes,
I shall have neither.
Look, the sun has almost set.
Now, go back to wherever you came from
with the little water and the little rice I gave you.
Look, I myself do not have
either any water or any rice.
Look, I have nothing except the few things
I didn't give
and kept with myself.
Translation :
The Poet
THE SOLDIER IN EXILE
Sometimes I wish I should return,
throw this body to the ground before the judges
installed in all the marketplaces of my country,
and tell them, come, hang it
on your gallows of prefabricated words.
Sometimes I wish I should stop hiding among rocks,
and feeding on the sunlight and on the wind,
sail across the ocean's nights and days.
I would then unload all my bones
into the arms of the soil smiling at my homecoming
and tell it I have no further part
in its future.
I however hesitate.
The shores of my country would be inaccessible
with stones dislodged by vengeance and counter-vengeance
and with putrid weeds of mangled interpretations,
all its green and proud forests would have been burnt
by loud proclamations of conquests that never occurred,
its body bleeding,
its railways and roadways and harbours shattered,
enacampments of imported mercenaries
all along the banks of its moist eyes.
All this notwithstanding,
I sometimes wish I should return,
but some other times I do not wish I should return.
Sometimes it seems all my love is a moon
rising every evening and setting every dawn
in the sky above wherever I exist.
Sometimes, however, I wish I should return.
Translation :
The Poet
RAMAKANTA RATH
SRIRADHA (19)
Come, take half
of the remainder of my life,
but fill every moment
of the half that is mine
with your infatuation.
Was the bargain unfair?
Then leave me with a single moment
and take away the rest of my life,
but like the sky,
fill the whole space
above that moment.
No, not like the sky.
Come closer and become the cloud
over my past, present and future
so that, when I touched myself,
I would touch the monsoon of your body.
Your sighs would breathe
the gale spewed by the despair
of a distant ocean
and, when I smile
and touch myself,
the gale would cease.
My lifetime,
unconcerned with its nearing death,
would everyday renew its pilgrimage
to the early years of your youth.
You would exist as a mass of blue
carved by my command,
or as the blue total
of all my known, partly known
and unknown desires.
Since I always dress in blue,
you too must be blue.
How can you have any other colour when
it would break my heart
if you had in colour other than blue?
Was the bargain unfair?
Then come, take away
even that single moment.
But do not bend down, look straight
into my eyes.
Meet there the impudent traveller
who has passed through hell after hell
and, at the end of the very last hell,
stands under a kadamba tree
and awaits your coming.
Translation :
The Poet
SRIRADHA (58)
You are the fragrance of rocks,
the lamentation of each flower,
the unbearable heat of the moon,
the icy coolness of the blazing sun,
the language of my letters to myself,
the smile with which all despair is borne,
the millenniums of waiting without a wink of sleep,
the ultimate futility of all rebellion,
the exquisite idol made of aspirations,
the green yesterdays of deserts,
the monsoon in an apparel of leaves and flowers,
the illuminated pathway from the clay to the farthest planet,
the fantastic time that's half-day and half-night,
the eternity of the sea's brief silence,
the solace-filled conclusion of incomplete dreams,
the dishevelled moment of waking up with a start,
the reluctant star in the sky brightening at dawn,
the unspoken sentences at farewell,
the restless wind sentenced to solitary confinement,
the body of fog seated on a throne,
the reflection asleep on the river's abysmal bed,
the undiscovered mine of the most precious jewels,
the outlines of lunacy engraved on space, and
the untold story of lightning.
You have, my dearest, always suffered
all my inadequacies with a smile.
I know I am not destined to bring you back once you've left.
All I can do hereafter, till the last day of my life,
is to collect the fragments of what you are
and try to piece them together.
Translation :
The Poet
LINES ADDRESSED TO HER NON-RESIDENT PRESENCE
I had thought
I had forgotten you entirely.
And then, one day, I quarrelled
with everyone—with wife, children,
with Government and God.
Before the quarrel ended, I walked away,
and stood near the window.
Outside the window
A moonlit fog extended
till the world's end.
You were there, draped in
Clothes made of the trees and the shurbs
on the river's banks.
A smile glimmered
on you melancholy skin.
In your eyes there was
a rain-wet paddy field that never ended.
Your uncombed hair fluttered in the wind
like leaves of sugarcane.
Your mouth, half-open and half-shut,
stood where all dialogue terminates.
Your legs rose from the dark depths of dreams.
Your body shook, and every single letter of your name
was written in the indelible ink of time past.
I knew you would leave soon.
How could you stay
Unless the time for staying came?
Wherever you go, a hand raised above shoulders
can touch the stars.
The steamer arrives every morning
to say good morning to women
who hold entire rivers in their eyes.
The earth and the outer space are one.
The eyes of eyes and the ears of ears
walk about in shaded coconut groves,
and gods and goddesses stand at your doorsteps
yearning for morsels of benediction
flowing from your meditation on yourself.
After your leave, what remains?
bare rocks, the moonlight's darkness
erasing all future,
several blood-stained years, dead soldiers
guarding unused gunpower on the sea-bed,
and the desolate road I must walk on
till the last day of my life.
Go, then, with so few days left to me,
a change in my condition can no longer be
the subject-matter of hope.
I now have fever almost everyday,
nerves from the waist to the heels ache,
and, if I rise up without proper precaution,
I feel I am descending into some bottomless depth.
The skin is loose and dry, the weight
has fallen, maybe someday now
my breath will stop somewhere inside the lungs.
I would have notified all this to you,
but then, didn't you and I discover long ago
that news of this kind was utterly useless
both for you and for me?
Translation :
The Poet
SITAKANT MAHAPATRA
THE COCKFIGHT
Armed from head to toe,
the two warriors are arraigned against each other.
Some anger enlarges
the dimensions of their narrow necks.
Battle drums announce
a face-to-face contest.
Hunting for insects has ceased.
Seeking refuge from hungry cats and hungrier men
has also ceased.
As battle cries rend the air
and carnage is due to commence,
the villagers leave behind their long history of cowardice,
and gather here.
The warriors do not know
what this war is about,
or who is whose enemy.
They do not comprehend
the clamour that rushes on this dumb village
like a bellowing sea.
The weapons they wear
strain their nerves.
And, suddenly, their blood is on fire,
feathers almost fly off their flesh,
and each cell of the body overflows with hatred.
The war is only a moment away,
and, when it arrives,
to kill to be killed will be all the same.
Evening descends
on a sky smeared with blood.
It's all over
in a moment.
Darkness erases all
the day's colours, the day's blood.
A day ends.
Carrying a handful of meat
that has lost its voice
the crowd returns.
The village is once again enclosed
by silence
breathing like an abandoned child.
Translation :
Ramakanta Rath
THE RUINED TEMPLE
On the mythic enchantress's open navel fall
the stars and the dew all through the night, silently.
On the steps of the temple's pond,
on the large shoulders of the wise Ganesa
are washed the greasy patchwork garments
of tradition and history.
Like the blind whimsical gods, or sometimes
like a sudden rush of wind, two or four bats
fly out from inside the dark along
the sharp lines of an indifferent sky
towards an uncertain tomorrow.
The long, unending afternoon comes to an end.
From some faraway place comes creaking
the sound of the bullock-cart's wheels.
It seems as though in a moment
time would stop—
over the distant untilled fields,
in the evening's lonely darkness.
Who calls whom—
so affectionately, full of desire and grief, greedily
(in this life, in the other life) ?
The smile on the water's broad and shining face,
like the gesture of a sudden wish, pulls
the temple's shadow and the rising moon
together, lovingly.
The long day ends, waiting.
The leprous beggar-woman begins to think—
if only some poor helpless worshipper should arrive
before she left the place
with her day's last weary yawn.
Translation :
Bibhu Padhi
SOUBHAGYA KUMAR MISRA
OF DEFERRED SPEECH
The sun has quite a few things to say.
But it hops from a bend in the river
to a downstream bathing place
where there are no bathers,
from there to yellow Aswattha leaves,
and then to malignant tumours in ovaries.
It thus squanders its time,
and when evening comes
it sets, without having said a thing.
The river has quite a few things to say.
But it flows on and on,
trying to inscribe the sun's wasted life
on the restless paper of its waters.
Its time terminates
in the incompetence of an obese ocean.
It's always impossible
to say even an infinitesemal part
of what one intended to say.
The soil, for example,
swells with the intent to speak
and, ultimately, disintegrates.
The day's light
hovers around the stamen of flowers,
around the raised hoods of snakes,
but in the end settles on the wings of a kite
and disappears into the immeasurable void.
This, probably, is the destiny of the poet.
Before he can relieve the mule of grammar
of sacks filled with intended speech,
crows descend and sit in a circle
around the cleansed wound.
Translation :
Ramakanta Rath
SIN
Afraid? Should I leave?
Heard from both sides, always—
and still no one comes near
from among those who ask and those who hear.
Do I stand in the interior dark
that I wouldn't feel fright or fear?
True, that on many disturbing mornings
I have noticed the alarm
in fresh tyre-marks on the wet earth;
just crushing the fruit in my fist
and admitting my hunger
have made me forgetful.
Such darkness that even the sky is invisible,
only innumerable stars
disclose how
they have slipped away
from that imperious cloud's hold,
the one who circles the leafless tree.
I don't wish to see anyone at all;
at a dangerous moment, certain words
are so full of arrogance
that they only strut insolently
in dark lanes.
Be seated wherever you are
by the window—
simply don't notice the sins I commit.
Translation :
Jayanta Mahapatra
THE SPRING
Halfknown, halfstranger
one to the other
all of us
in spring time
Earth-crawling creeper
suddenly stands up
like a twisted goldstick
and then shivers
The viewer gets numbed
Cruel her stare
like the breasts
of a girl in early teens
His eyes get lowered
Buds of white thirst
sprout on tiny shoots
and yet
the root drinks fire
You, hot rock floor,
give up your dream
of rising like a minar
melt and confess
the defeat
Thunder this time
shall not strike
though sky
may collapse
Only a peacock-plume
dropping down and down
will touch tenderly
the tip of consciousness
of the green shoots
at the top.
There's no horn,
no nail, no tooth,
no prick—
you, handsome one, debonair,
raise your eyes
you, innocent one !
Thirst is the pitcher,
It's drinkable, too;
take a palmful,
drink.
In gentle-wild anger
it gets injured—
the sitar in the lap.
Fire of root on the lips :
touch it,
taste it.
If a minar bends down
does a cannon
get born ?
From the root to the top
today it's all buds,
watery.
Even if a cannon bursts
today,
colours squirt through.
Today
it's spring time—
Even betrayal
is love
today.
JESUS CHRIST
You are so faraway,
and, yet,
I hear the footfalls of your breath
on the wind's corridor.
Remain faraway
so that my soul
that bought whole history with
a few drops of blood
may smile a little longer
on the crucifix.
In the end, of course,
I shall raise my body
on the podium of your unbelief.
And you, Jesus,
will be its keeper
when a new shroud is spread
on the indestructible coffin
of History.
Translation :
Ramakanta Rath
MASK : MY FACE
What shall I do now?
Shall water the day and
watch it melting away or
sleep inside the
fruit of our shame its
seeds hardening with fear?
The first night followed by
a million other nights I
grow old the killer's amorphous
quest sans quest locked
in the barrel, motionless, waiting
for the hours to dry and
the roots to unlock
the door on the mask
into my plain face my
secret harvest
Translation :
The poet
ASUTOSH PARIDA
I WILL BE HERE
I will be here
like the words made of bones
like a hill of metal
like an inscription;
I will be here
in every wound, every injury
in bleedings not dried up still.
So long as I am here
fire will not be extinguished,
eyelids will not droop,
words will not be silent;
so long as I am here
there will be no secrets.
I will be here
at the end of all the evolutions.
After all the crimes
have been committed
I will be here
as witness and proof.
Who can cover me up
with ash or mud?
Who can ever hide me
in a box or in the grave?
I will dump, in the debris behind the eyes,
all those illusions
daring to dazzle.
Amid the eddies of all streams
I will stand erect like a pole,
hardened though,
with tales not to be lost
interlining my heart.
Faces would be appearing with guises,
hands stretching like hooks,
the hawk will be demanding flesh,
the god will be demanding obedience.
Presuming me deaf
some will be indulging in obscene talks,
presuming me to be blind,
some will be dancing naked before me,
again, presuming me to be dead
some will be taking me in a funeral march.
I will be here.
If someone curses me dead
I will be getting born,
again and again.
I will not be burnt
in fire, will not
drown in water.
I will inscribe on my chest
all that has happened,
is happening
or will ever happen.
So long as I am here
there will be crops in the fields,
there will be flowers in the gardens;
so long as I am here
there will be blood-flow
in the veins of humans.
I will be here,
living, as long as
the world is there.
Translation :
Rabindra K Swain
THE UNTOUCHABLE
Could one confer it
or ever can :
the right
to walk on earth,
to touch the wind,
to look at the sun
to love the moon.
Could one confer it, or ever can?
But the time of my birth
was such that all the rights
had been looted.
What remained was
only a reddish body,
only left-outs, faeces,
vomits, sputum;
only defeats
accumulated over births and rebirths.
The day I started walking
an earthen pot was hung
on my chest where
I would collect my spit
and a broom on my waist
that would clear
all the way my feet travelled.
Who were you there
watching me?
Man or monster?
The walls without gates
looked like hills.
All the valuables of the world
were kept hidden from my eyes.
No human being was there,
except me.
There was no right
on land or water.
It was not there in the scriptures,
among the people or in the society.
What was there
was only defeat
of the flowers of the dreams
and heaps of corpses.
The right
was of touching those corpses,
of carrying them;
was of diving into the drain water
till one touched the hell
and the curse was there
to litter, to crawl like worms.
Where am I now :
close by or in exile?
in drain or with fire?
Do you search me
in the deepest wound
of the earth?
In the brute pages of history?
Do you search me
in some metamorphosis of humans?
Translation :
Rabindra K Swain
BANSHIDHAR SARANGI
PLUCKING FLOWERS
The blossoming of a flower
is not the end-all of things,
a day will come when someone will pluck it
to place it somewhere only he knows.
It seems perfectly worthwhile for us
to guard it, staying hidden somewhere,
or else no one will ever know
when this stealer of flowers
would come in stealth
to complete his mission.
For plucking a flower
is not such an arduous task
nor is it such a priceless object
that we'd worry about it so much.
Whatever you might say,
there is some mystery
behind the plucking of a flower,
and who can deny the twofold role
that exists between the flower's blooming
and its dropping to earth?
It's unbecoming to keep a watch
for the flower to bloom,
for who can tell the moment of flowering?
Can one say
that it will rain for certain
when clouds spread across the sky?
It's not easy to assert
there is a last word for everything.
Simply raise both your palms upward,
may be you'll find a flower
falling from somewhere.
Translation :
Jayanta Mahapatra
WIND
The tree sifts the wind with its clutch.
The wind leafs in someone's ribs.
A skeleton lies at close range.
Dogs and jackals hold a mass dinner
on your bones.
The wind remains.Dogs and vultures
remain. A corpse lies abandoned.
Whose it is ? Maybe some cow or ox.
In the distant bamboo grove rattles
the wind—the ruffian that beats down
leaves.
The hunter shot a bird dead with
his gun.Men were coming along the way.
The gushing blood dried up on the dead bird's
body.Who dried it up?
It is the wind.
Translation :
Harishankar Acharya
BHANUJI RAO
FISH
Dawn,
like the petal of drenched roses.
Six nude bodies
furtively glide forward
in the practised motions of some dance,
rippling the water's sleek body.
Slowly they close in towards one another,
cutting across the cries
of the kingfisher and the kite.
They move up, six torsos,
black and naked,
deepening the repose of snail and pristine toad.
And now the net is wound,
rising up
under twelve greedy, watchful eyes;
threshing bodies of mahseer and tiny fry,
brilliant as the sun.
POEM
When you tell the flower
to remain in bloom until you return,
I will weep then for the first time,
and the flower trembling in the spring breeze
will wilt in the sun like a memory in blossom.
The second weeping will take place
with the corpse of the day's end,
waiting for your return when the stricken flower
would see the evening come in.
Then perhaps, in the dark, the flower
would quietly come down from the tree
and be lost strangely somewhere.
I will weep for the last time
when in the blackest darkness
you will not return.
THE SNAKE I SAW
I didn't see it, dangling
on the bough bearing the forbidden fruit,
tempting
the nude, primaeval Woman
in God's garden.
Its coiled elegance, its bejewelled hood
I did not see.
I didn't see its fragile frame,
winter-struck,
in the dewy fields of November
inching its way
upto the farmer's hearth,
basking,
aroused again,
warmer and fiercer.
Nor did I see it, wafting
in a tame, enchanted game
like a wavelet of the unruly sea
playing around the feet
of the celestial fairy, Urvasi,
on a spring dawn.
I saw it
like the cold hand of Death,
I saw it slithering in dark
underneath the bamboo-grove.
And suddenly it sprang up
like a hot summerstorm,
upraised hood,
lightning-tongued;
Under its eyes a spread of desert
and thirsty mirages,
dancing.
I saw it :
a garland around the blue neck
of the Lord-of-Destruction:
Shiva !
Above the neck
gnarled, auburn hair.
Lips chanting belligerence.
Venom dripping
from the cracked urn.
And, beyond that I saw
the stream of white consciousness,
the eternal descent of RiverGanga...
I saw it :
I saw the snake.
THE LONG-HAIRED GIRL
Once, a long-haired girl had come to my room,
her breasts like melting light, hands wreathed
in flowers and death, two cool eyes in the rust
of her tears.
An actress of unforgiving love
and impassive blood,the pores of her skin excited
with envy, the glory of her lies bedazzling her youth
over and over again, the lines of her body in gleaming gold,
and on her face sin and prayer.
One day a long-haired girl had come to my room.
All alone. For a brief moment, and then was gone,
for I was away in some distant land; and in my house
a slave, an eunuch, stood on guard.
RUMOURS
It's true—and not a rumour—
that sometimes, after moonrise,
the night is as bright as the day.
The moon, too, as much as the sun,
throws out shadows.
It's true—and no rumour—
that sometimes dead men and women smile.
I have myself seen a young woman called Priyamvada
smiling after she hanged herself
on a full-moon night.
When they laid her on the hearse
she blew away, with a gust of her smile,
the face of the lover who should have come.
I had never seen a smile
so beautiful and so full of life
on her lips, in her eyes and, above all,
on her face
as long as she had lived.
It's true—and no rumour—
that sometimes darkness spreads like a fog.
Look at the child,sleeping quietly in the cradle.
He had raised quite a clamour
in his mother's lap just a moment ago.
Memories from some earlier life
come down in dreams
and settle on the face
that now looks like the inside of an ancient temple--
dark, except for the tentative glow
of an earthen lamp.
Practically everyone can
swim his way through a pool.
Crossing the wind's rough sea
is a far more difficult enterprise.
Not many can continue to be themselves
once they are face to face
with memory gushing down like a river in spate,
or arriving in inconsolable blasts
of a restless storm.
I shall continue to be myself.
I am no fool, and shall never believe
in rumours according to which
thinking about one who has gone away
always makes one very,very sad.
NOON PRAYER
Along with the flow of my blood,
through the body's blue cavern,
they come,
those millions of fireflies, stars and nebulae;
thousands of fish lift me,
like memories, from the ocean floor.
And, like a snake,
the twelve-cubit-long sigh of despair
rises from the small temple of my body
and crawls up its broken walls.
Drenched in rain
and in the anguish of moonlight,
many inert shadows
huddle about its burnt-out wick's smell,
and the newcomer who once left
returns through the open spaces in the leaves.
Morning brings back the body's distances,
with bewildered cries
night-birds swaying from its nerves fly away,
as the fortified morning
breaks through the chest-walls.
And I lose myself,melting away elsewhere.
Elsewhere,
my sacrificial fire's smoke rises into the sky.
KALAHANDI
Put away the road maps now.
To go there,
you do not need
helicopters any more;
wherever there is hunger,
there Kalahandi is.
The god of rain
turned away his face.
There was not one green leaf
left on the trees for supper.
The whole village a graveyard.
Cracked ground,
drab river sand.
All the plans failed;
the poverty line
receded further.
Wherever you stare,
there Kalahandi is :
in the sunken eyes
of living skeletons,
in rags which do not
cover the frail bodies,
in the utensils
pawned off for food,
in the crumbling huts
with unthatched roofs,
in the exclusive prosperity
of having owned
two earthen pots.
Kalahandi is there everywhere :
in the gathering of famished crowds
before charity kitchens,
in market places
where children are auctioned off,
in the sighs of young girls
sold to brothels,
in the silent procession
of helpless people
leaving their hearth and home.
Come, look at Kalahandi closer:
in the crocodile tears
of false press statements,
in the exaggerated statistics
of computer print-outs,
in the cheap sympathies
doled out at conferences,
and in the false assurances
presented by planners.
Kalahandi is very close to us :
in the occasional contribution
of our souls,
in the unexpected nagging of conscience,
in the rare repentance
in empathy,
in the nightmares
appearing through sound sleep,
in disease, in hunger,
in helplessness,
in the abject fear
of an impending bloodshed.
How could we then walk
into the celebrated portals
of the twentyfirst century,
leaving Kalahandi behind ?
LAMP EXTINGUISHES
How does
a bird
when the wings are cleft,
a child
when the mother dies,
a lyric
when the song is over
live?
As with
the counting
of waves, night ends;
the counting of days
night breaks in,
likewise
promises
life ends!
life ends.
THE MAN IN FRONT OF YOU IS A MIRROR
The man in front of you is a mirror
Gaze at his eyes that sketch your image
As your eyes sketch his.
No, a reflection is never a household thing
Which can be concealed in a box,
In the heart, in a mirror, in the skull or in trees and flowers.
Your image floats in a moving fan and from
The turning wheel a fish watches the arrowpoint
Although I know Death is dancing like the aerial roots
I pin rest of my days in your hair
The man in front of you is a mirror
Gaze at his eyes that sketch your image
As your eyes sketch his.
In your eyes the cornfields and the sprawling clouds
The rivulets sketch different pictures
Do they know how things have been rolled into one
How cloud is not different from rivulet,
Rivulet from rock
Rock from mountain range
And Mother Earth
From that ocean is not separate also
The underlined words of the verse
Are not delinked from the sentence,
From inquiry and mind
And never the desires are different from grinding intellect.
To such views eye appears as banian leaf
The left half of my body is different from the right
And the universe from the mirror
Roots and shoots from the tree and the claws from aerial roots
The fish from arrowpoint and so forth and so forth.
The man in front of you is a mirror
And there is a mirror behind
Mirror to the left and mirror to the right and above and below
Your myriad images flash in dancing mirrors
And inside the mirror whose heart is it
Whose heart you are sketching
The thousand-handed, the million-footed, the billion-handed has one heart
That throws thousands of silver swords into the sky:
A sun of never-ending love and pricks.
MEMORY
The bird sings in false notes.
No fish in the river, no star in the sky.
No dawn breaks
No hope, no curse,
Nothing.
No letter,
Not even the barest sign of an address.
Everywhere scattered ink-drops
Like wrong acts of life.
The bird sings in false notes.
No more through eyes
Memory now seeks other avenues.
Where the black pigeon flaps its wings
The deceptive moon betrays the morning,
Where the wide steps of the wind
Disturb the waters of the river.
Which Midas touch
Turns memory into tears ?
Memory is the squarefoot of time
And the capital is a city of tears.
Memory is regular like time
And each clock has a punishing look.
The ticking clock
Love's eternal enemy, the graveyard of memory.
Memory : the squarefoot of time
And the city only a city of tears.
Everywhere
Drops of void absence
Like the empty girls' commonroom in summer vacation.
Alas, the bird sings false notes, false notes
THE GHOST OF THE UNBORN
All your breasts
overflow with milk.
Overbrimmed pitchers, spilling water,
Mothers ! You'll pass this way !
On this path, from the river.
Dripping milk, you'll pass by,
drop by drop...
Mother died
unable to give birth to me,
I died without being born.
Same womb, same flower, same pain,
and the accumulated milk meant for me, dying;
now in this tree like an unseen bird
I perch, oh mother!
Like you, too my mother
used to fetch water from the river,
I could have been born from your womb too,
I too could have been cradled in your arms,
I too could have reached for the milk in your breasts,
and I too could have been the star of your eye.
But I have no lips,
and thirst cries on only for milk.
This way you will always pass by,oh mothers,
I could have been your child tooSO NOW YOU HAVE A PLACE IN HISTORY
You had sought a place in history.
Well, you will now exist
in history and nowhere else.
It probably did not occur to you
that once you entered history there was no exit,
you would forever remain
far away from my embrace.
I had always wanted
that you did not turn into history,
that you stayed beside me,
that your eyes accompanied me like stars,
that your midnight whisper caressed me
like a tender word of solace,
that your love played about like a breeze
in my body's universe
spread out like a peacock's feathers.
I had never wanted
my secret life to turn into history.
I have seen history's rock-like silence.
I comprehend
the sadness in time's eyes.
I therefore know there is no way out for you
in history's pages,
there are no steps you can climb
in the dark region of time
you inhabit.
The road will always be without traffic.
Blasts of cold wind will never cease.
There will be darkness everywhere.
God knows how many times you will be dismantled
and reassembled by the useless magic of my thought.
History is an emperor.
It does not know common folk like you and me.
Senseless with the pride of its eternal life,
it tramples upon the soul's longings
uttered in a language without words.
THE CIRCUS BOY
The small boy performs in the circus.
His thin hands and feet
are ant-eaten timber
between living and dying
only an ignoble truce.
Even now in his eyes
the mango grove
of his village, the fairy tales;
in his feet the mad intoxication
of running after butterflies, snapped kites;
but he performs in the circus
controlling his hands and feet
he only performs in the circus.
His laughter, tears and innocent demands
are now sweat on his forehead;
in the emptiness of living
he is only an articulate
a truncated tree in the public park
a burnt-out black grain of rice;
he is crippled time incarnate.
The small boy performs in the circus
in the soft lap of Time
only a victim, a moth-eaten moment.
LOVE'S MYSTERY
I love myself, immersed in my own mystery
in the fast-moving years of youth;
and yet how little I know
the image of my love, the voice of my body
the song of my gestures known, unknown
the smiles and the looks !
Like the sea or the vocalist
how I lose myself in unknowing
the mysterious voice of the silence !
I too love you
you are nearest to me like my own self;
may be that is why you make me
pine for the unknown
in unrealised eagerness.
The waves of desires dancing
on your nubile gestures in
the intricate leela of Vrindaban
you are my self's self
as obscure to me as my own self.
MOSS
My feet slipped in the yard,
too much of moss there.
So what if I fell down ?
Ashamed ?
What should I be ashamed of ?
It's natural to fall.And there is glory
in getting up.
Some are smiling as if their feet
haven't slipped ever
on this moss.
Scrub you may hard and often,
it grows again, this moss :
to grow is its nature,
and nothing can make it vanish.
Of course, I should have been careful
while walking down the yard.
That would have spared me
such a big fall.
My hands and feet are injured.
In the unhurt body
this injury is not much.
Soon it will heal, the ache
may last till tomorrow.
The scar will remain for sometime,and
gradually it will merge into my skin.
After my fall, I hope you will be cautious
as you walk from this side to that,
you've to move very slowly, you know,
pressing your feet to the ground.
And if you slip even after that
I must say you didn't move with caution,
only faked to do so.
Mark these three words : moss, fall and caution;
inevitably linked they are.
If you take them together and infer a meaning,
it's of some use, otherwise
you will continue to slip-and-fall, again and again,
and take in its pain.
Translation :
Rabindra K Swain
THE POET
Someone makes me write with my hand in his,
His breath in my experience,
his breathing warm in my ears.
Yet do I know what gets written on this paper?
Intoxicated as I am then by that ecstatic closeness,
I live on in my own amazement.
But realization makes me aware then
That he isn't there; where then is the delight
of his touch ?
Merely he has written a poem and left it behind,
A poem resembling a poem,
For me to be the poet of the poem.
THE SPIDER
The ovum of pains
and pleasures
is so imprisoned
within the impenetrable webs of time
that the rainbow of passion
drops down like a sacred thread
from the chest of the violet skies.
Who's going to be born
out of the unbroken endurance
of the holy mother earth?
A tramp of a poet
restlessly pining for his beloved...
Or an unearthly Pururava
longing for coition
with Urvasi—the darling of gods...
Or a thorn-crowned Son of Man ?
In the divine dawn of compassion
the subtle pierces the gross
and a formless "anustup" metre
penetrates into the subtle.
And then is annihilated
the mystic kingdom
of the spider.
THE FALLEN LEAF
O my fallen leaf of pausa
why did you fall
forgetting your cradling
on the green boughs ?
Is the kiss of the grey earth
sweeter, dearer
than
the blue embrace of the sky ?
Last spring
when you came
as a new bride
drenched in shame
wearing a pink saree,
to welcome you
the sweet moaning shehnai of
lakhs of bees echoed;
but
today
when you fall silently
why are these tears of sorrow
in the eyes of pausa ?
O fallen leaf,
Pausa's fallen leaf,
what have you left for me :
the embrace of the blue sky
or
the kiss of the grey earth ? THIRST
Upon your beach
now I stand as an exile
a loving and doleful soul.
I have a mind
that's pale and poisoned.
I have a heart
that's torn and bleeding.
I have a conscience
that's complex and bitten.
But, my dear,
in the looks of your loving azure eyes
in a single kiss on your passionate cheeks
I shall get back
my primaeval mind, heart and conscience,
and my marine soul.
Can you offer me these ?
But I hear in your trembling voice
a broken and doleful tune.
They have taken away
by churning, vexing and plundering
they have pinched away
the fragrance of your rich elegance.
Well, let them take these away.
Let them appear bright and godly
in your illumination.
I am a lover of ugliness,
of scandal and lethal poison.
I am a mysterious adept
of death and graveyard,
of all-devouring Time.
In your drinking bowl
if you have left the lees
of stain, scandal and venom,
give these to me, I pray
give me now.
I want to drain away from your cheeks
all that's insinuating
sinful and venomous.
In my nerves and veins
in each drop of my blood
for you only
my thirst :
quenched and unquenched.
My darling,
just in one kiss only
I shall dry up
all the agony
of your briny soul THE GRAVE
Beloved,
set me free...
to relish freedom
that is in the grave.
If life means only pain
it's not bad,
if life is only an ominous dream
not bad
if life is only a battle.
In the stream of time
decimal by decimal
life devalues into an effect
a brass coin
and life means
the penance of a lifeless mountain
with uplifted hands
that touch the limitless sky.
Then, o beloved,
is not life suicidal?
I hate suicide
but I want freedom.
Beloved,
set me free...
to get such freedom in the grave
after the fulfilled copulation
with you
poised in urdhwapada.
A POEM ON ANTI-SELF
Like a night of lost consciousness
your intimate presence
wordless silent pain,
time and again
tumbling on the rough time
this procession of existence
towards nonexistence
is your intimate presence.
Let me paint one evening.
And then, seasons were disciplined
but rivers were uncontrolled
like menstruating women.
Bathing in the moonlight
the mountains seemed aslumber:
like blue-lily breasts
of women facing upward.
In such an evening
tortured
and being nothing,
I am searching my way
sometimes moving fast—
and then, encircling my own self
as a blind deer
sniffs at her own body
feels aroused and blind
in the soft darkness.
For me the world is an illusion
I am a gipsy woman,
the inheritor of
life, death and life-after-death.
Yet, I am counterfeit
I have defeated the knight chivalrous
strange, sober, handsome,
but imprisoned for ever
in a horseman,
and he being lost
in me for eternity.
In such an evening
when I try to feel myself
I am nowhere
and you,
hurdling over your existence
merge into the nonexistence.
I never think that I am a river
of freedom
and to get my freedom
this is my own march
towards my own death,
pierced by my own arrow
I am the cause of my own death.
I am my own dhrupadi.
THE VOICE OF A LONG SHADOW
The corpse is in slumber
and all the choicest flowers of his eyes
have withered. They slept
for the last time in his eyes;
nevertheless two drops of tears
have rolled down
from his affectionate eyes:
all will burn : those eyes,
those flowers and tears.
The corpse is burning:
with it get burnt
a few dialogues— Time's,
a few mournful voices—his unquenched thirst's.
Flowers get burnt, tears too.
So lonely the eyes when they began to burn!
I am also burning : in my breath,
my dearest flowers are also
burning in my eyes
and my eyes
are also burning : as if
I am a corpse;
bewildered, unconcerned
but innocent.
On the eve of the New Year
in the letters
I have received
everyone has written—
they are also burning
like me
like the corpse.
UNNECESSARY
The golden lines of Devisutra or Geeta
begin the day's first move.
And then the hot steam of excited cups of tea,
ignoring all rules of hygiene.
While sipping tea, gather the kith and kin.
There comes the seven-year-old daughter, Pupun,
holding a Picture-Book : Ramayana.
The wife begins her day's chores,
with "Songs-on-Request"
blasting from her Radio.
Brightening the cause of the hour of trial,
with immense eagerness I narrate to Pupun
the stories of Seeta and Ravana.
But unmindfully,
like a red, red ripe apple
the sun comes
and stands in front of me.
While shaving, I get wish-waves,tempting.
Breaking down all walls
come in to cling onto my body.
Like an intoxicated boat
float towards the indefinite time.
The bell resounds inside the body.
On heaps of falsehood
the scattered sunshine of impatience.
And, while searching the stairs of freedom,
quietly
with all interests
arrives :
the birthtime of another morning...
The world seems old
and, under the vast sky,
one feels himself dispensable,
unnecessary.
THE VICTIM
Not time.
Many times I have proudly thought
of loving you;
each of these moments of mine
are themselves victims
like that dog Laika
moving for years in the emptiness of space.
The victim is this age we are born.
The victim is not just that man
crucified two thousand years back
or that old man
who fell with his face down
in the prayer meeting at Delhi
forty five years ago
or Sakya
or the youthfulness of Marylin Monroe.
Perhaps
at last sacrfice lies
in the justification of life.
Sometimes you are very close to me
or sometimes you are not there
sometimes I am not there
and at other times
neither both of us nor others are there
and rain and summer and winter
come and go;only a little of happiness,
a little of sadness,
a little of emptiness
goes on being sacrificed.
Translation :
Rabindra K Swain
THE PRICE OF POSTCARD HAS NOT GONE UP, HAS IT?
No, the price has not gone up
for long years.
Even in this new budget
the price remains the same
as before : fifteen paise.
But
take this Malli,for example.
She would be nearly seventy
but till today
she has not written a post card.
She has never had the need of it.
Only two or three months back
she got a card from her grandson
after her daughter and son-in-law
settled in Kharagpur
getting a job in the Railways.
Says the oldwoman,
this Puja vacation
her daughter and son-in-law
will come home.
Her neighbours will compliment her
on her house being festive on the occasion.
Would Mallibudhi care anybody, then ?
Malli will go on being a silent onlooker
to her children's cries,
jokes and laughter, to the rites
and festivals, to time's maya
and to the increased expenditure in the family.
The old days of her poverty would then brew
in the dry bones of her conscience—
it is the slow dying, not her death,
that would then cascade like water
down her wrinkled hands.
Because
how would she know the world is so big ?
Is she a cloud in the sky
or a barge drifting on some sea ?
Has she ever seen the hands of history
in the book of her grandchild ?
Hers is only a small life
standing day after day
like that fifteen-paise post card
whose price has not gone up for a long time.
CHILDREN ARE NOT HOME
The children are not home, they are gone.
The home is empty and rooms so blank.
Void spreads, layer by layer like slough
The time has no throb of life
for it is still
and dead like the vast eternity.
Moments born of Time,
the fond mother of all
search for their playmates
for it is the time for play.
The children are not home, they are gone
The walls are mute
and the floor of my room
seems like an old lady
that has suddenly stopped telling tales
to children fond of her tales.
The rooms are blank and stillness hangs
from the ceiling
that seeks to be thrilled to life.
The floor seeks
the words of a coaxing mother
and the look of fear and helplessness
that once kept it alive andgay.
The eyes rub my limbs
and set balloons high
letting them soar with laughter
that cannot be easily grasped.
The children are not home, they are gone.
From afar I can see
the soft palms like tender leaves
glistening in the light
of the eyes beyond the gate.
Are they speaking to me or telling a tale
of fairies in gardens
or knights in the woods?
Suddenly I leap
to the street bathed in the sun
leaving this lonely room, vast and blank
and there I can feel
the uproar of my children giggling
or the language of eyes
in their wistful liberty.
But the street becomes a stretch of void
and the trees stare on
with mute eyes that cannot see the fun.
I return to the room
and switch on the fan.
As I close my eyes I feel,
my body dissolving by degrees
slowly and slowly
the uproar of children come
floating to my ear
like the fainting waves of a distant sea.
And in me the waves dance eagerly.
And that faint uproar
of my children cacklingis transformed
into a bright flood of light in me.
In me the smiles of flowers of charming
colours take to wings.
The blankness of the room
dissolves in me.
I am lost in reverie
and silence is drowned
in that enthralling noise.
that plaintive note fades
from my mind.
I ask myself :
Are not the children home ? Are they gone ?
WAITING FOR THE LORD
The snow sparkles
Over the Himalayas...
A little sparrow
Lisping the Lord's prayer
Flutters its wings
And knows not
Where to perch itself.
A camp here
And a camp there
Crying against each other
Lure the winged one
To jump into the fire
They have lit for the night.
From afar
You can hear
The supersonic shouts
Of the camp followers
Frantically trying to tear apart
The soul of the little sparrow
With their dogmas
And doctrines.
All around hovers
The shroud
Of a killing chill
And the sparrow
Keeps on whispering
Into eternity
The sublime words
Of the Lord's Prayer:
Hallowed by thy name
Thy kingdom come
Thy will be done. THE LIGHT
OF THE PRISON
Even darkness fears
To step into this prison.
But, whom to fear?
The sentry
or the sleepless prisoners?
The sound of the tired feet
Of the sentry
Lapses into the throb
Of the prisoners' hearts.
The iron-bars,
Trembling with human breath,
Terror-stricken,
Concede their defeat.
The dark shadows
Of the prison cells
Turn into a chiaroscuro
In the sharp emanation of light.
The earth under the sentry's feet
slips away.
The bird-of-light,
Flying out of the prisoner's heart
Watches from the sky
How the underground saplings
Break the rocks open
And lift up in speed
Towards light.
ALBUM
With the long breaths of time
looks bright
this album,
where lie ensconced
our infancy and youth
memories of the rainbow
and dreams of you;
even the toys and ribbons of our children
when they were toddlers,
everything,
safely preserved.
In some nights like this
when my illusive heart
bends in pain
and in intolerable loneliness,
I open
my album.
Then the loud shivering laughter
of phantoms
melts in the empty air.
KARMAVIRA
In the front
everything is visible
yet astonishing
the sudden deep embrace
and the unconscious conscience.
Live,
fill up your pocket
with whatever you get
fill up the basket
plucking flowers to your fulfilment
assume darkness
to be light
march on—
it does not mean anything
as to which tree is
without blossom
which village is
washed away in the flood.
The only witnesses to your sin are:
the deceiving smile
foolish hypocrites
torn pieces of papers
corrupt practitioners
for recognition
or begging bowls !
In the blessed dreams of luxury
yawns
the tireless chhau dance
as if in the dense boughs
a thirsty bird twitters
merrily
looking at
the sudden burst of rain.
The day, eyes opened,
the ocean is
sailing on waves
uncertainty in the air
the bright moon
the promise of a shore
and
to anchor.
The wild waves washed away
the sand castles
and threw them back again
from the lap of the aged mother
from the earth to the sky
from the sky to the earth
in search of freedom
move restlessly
from the shade of the Bodhidruma
to the thirst of jnana yoga.
The stick of the helpless age
in hand
the clock of painted relationship
on body
the delight of the greenery
in the mind
freedom is a consolation
searching
in darkness,
the statue of one's
smiles and tears
is recognised in the mirror
or in a drop of tear
in someone's eyes.
THE EMPEROR
Emperor !
when you command
the grey and serene earth shivers
the stars and planets
hang
silently like balls
here and there
in the empty space.
The sky is throbbing
with the chorus
singing the glory of
the associated deities,
at a wink
come in
like the disciplined patient mountain
the thunderous storm and rain.
In the midst of the thunder
you can withstand, o Emperor !
under your ominous
illusive, strange cover.
The spontaneity of your life
is shocked and silent
encircled by the
poisonous smoky words
of hypocrisy,
your humanitarian consciousness
becoming mechanical.
O great Emperor,
have you ever thought
in this vast universe
your worda of vanity
to show your power,
your loud commanding voice
like foolish soliloquies
seem meaningless,
and will be lost
in a wink of an eye.
So what is the way, Emperor ?
Will you love the poor
grow sympathy and relationship
drop tears of fondness,
the face, an affectionate
image of smile, love, kindness,
or will you be
the cursed, fearful expression
of a blind revenge,
a face full of jealousy,
like the blood-thirsty butcher's
bright, burning eyes
of fire ?
PAIN
The world appears as if to end,
like grains of rice hard to find
on a leaf-plate after a meal—
the diverse movements of a lifetime,
a gust of unforeseen wind
traces its marks and leaves.
Afternoon, and in a swing of eager sunlight
is it a pale picture that rocks back and forth?
Who is the artist ?
Afterwards,just a blur of shadow
For in a sudden explosion
was everything wiped out, creatures all,
every sound, each and every inanimate.
Does memory ever have a body ?
And can a body carry its memory for all time ?
Unspoken despair stands up
and sits down over and over again,
unable to escape from itself
being itself alone.
Man is buried
in a world of his own making,
like a river that has reached its end
in a small shack of a labourer repairing the bank,
leftover life,having lost its identity,
keeps on tormenting at every instant.
THE SECOND CHAPTER
To this we have come, through many sorrows
past the ashes of Troy, forgetting the tyranny
and lawlessness, forgetting adultery, the faces
of rebellion, the loaned houses of Harappa,
the lanes and corners and swarms of children,
the memories of those other islands
washed by the seven seas.
Will we go back again to that first tangled evening ?
If we wish to remember today
Libya's Lotophagi, our friends of countless lotuses,
to have our fill of many-splendoured dreams,
to enjoy the soft spume of this rood
and as swine under Circe's magic spell.
If here we spend some days—
why then should we suffer remorse ?
Why should we invoke phantoms, hoping for prophecies to come about ?
May be they will shatter our dreams again
with loud proclamations
in the words of Gandhi, Buddha, or Jesus.
THE SUNSET
The sun sets behind the hills,
songs swell, cattle plod their way home
and dream-boats float on
the flood of flute-tune;
the sun sets behind the hills and beyond
the cliffs and crests.
The pine woods lengthen their shadows
like giraffe stretching its neck
and the wayfarer sings on his way home,
and one can hear
the strains of a plaintive flute
in the mottled shadows beyond the hills.
You come stealthily tiptoeing
crossing the marshland and ferns,
leaping over fields and fence.
You come tinkling the ankle-bells
like the incorporeal soul,
you come to play to spraying colour with my blood
so that you can forget who you are.
All ways are lost,
all memories are wiped clean
all words dissolve in the blood gush
of this sunset
and the accursed night seems never to end.
The sun sets behind the hills
and shadows lengthen growing dense;
the wayfarer breaks down in a cold apathy.
The lonely shadow walks, losing its legs;
hands cannot clasp the shadows of one's own
and the sunset spreads a shoreless sea of pain
unfathomed, unplumbed.
THE BORN-BLIND DESCRIBES HIS RAINBOW
Perchance there looms up a rare dark
with muted footfalls of solitude
or an eerie surge from the north-east
and then, for a moment,
the eyes of Born-Blind liven up
and see a rainbow
on the sloping bough of the sky.
And, what a rainbow!
Its first shade soused with blood-colour
of the slayed bee-swarm.
In its second shade :
the consent of the Queen-Bee, a visualized shape
of a new Hive yet to be sculpted.
In the third, the shadow of the white breeze
Sin and slur in the fourth.
The fifth colour : a grotesque void.
The stench of burnt-out kadamba-tree
in the sixth.
The seventh takes its hue from the agony
of the trounced enemy.
Such is that rainbow!
It has an eighth colour, in which
Born-Blind sights a well-studded star of another darkness
and the third bank of a river not yet astream.
REACHING OUT INTO NOTHINGNESS
Say it again, the simple words
won't denote meaning to such banal
meaninglessness, as we know,
the precious waiting is a dignified
entity, the backside of your temperamental
visiting card.
Bones have this funny habit,they have to
shed flesh, water down the blood and
have to embrace dust to become dust.
Inevitably our knowledge regarding
despair does never flower into
protected relationship and, it is really funny, that
relationship is like fossilized bone,
once intact, now seemingly meaningless dust
even nostrils failing to acknowledge.
One's own silence pesters wayward motives
to branch out and emote in a
stabilised world of unfamiliar shadows.
Say it again, the familiar human touch
can be so monotonous that one will
prefer to stay back, at least knowing that
shadows are after all shadows,if
once can get hurt by absent images,
then knowledge have not reached yet
regarding what harms these harmless
shadows can bring upon.
THE STEPS
Self-propelled resolves the fireball—the earth
heaped in the cold storage :
shimmer the two eyes of the fish,
cloud, the dry teats of a canine female,
drinks to the dregs
the dark.
Sex-tear wets the soul.
boiling in winter, rain and cold.
God,
the Supreme Lord of Life and Death,
Time has expired :
Who,our own, is left alive?
Heart or sorrow? Crematorium or the Cell ?
Vasectomy indulged in self-preservation,
test-tube babies keep on taking birth,
hunger digests hunger,
thirst is immortal.
Love saturates the bloody balloon,
soul, in its vacuum,
perforce creates the Cleavage and the Pupa—
the family symbols of the bipeds. Pyramids
scan the transformation of form and qualities
of civilisation sans feelings of sex.
Its existence will be dissolved,
leaving memories
like those of Dinosaur, Amphioxus,
with biologists alone.
A new leaf of civilisation is opened in the planet
as if a fresh poster gets pasted
on a cinema poster again.
Translation :
Manmohan Thakore
MORNING
Then it will be morning
and birds will sing;
in the polluted harbour
I will anchor to safety
and look at the sky,
when it will be morning.
Sirens sound
the call of war
the whole body burns
no light no darkness
no ship no drumbeats
shall I go out to the street ?
Layers of the dust of sorrow
harden to stone
splitting open that stone
new crops will smile.
I will drink milk from the breasts of the earth
I will kiss everybody's heart
I will distribute the nirmalya of love,
When will it be morning ?
SORROWS : ENCIRCLING THE SEA
The horizon between
the sea and the sky
fastens my sorrows
stretching over miles of lands
and frays its gap.
The wind blows in
the perfumes of a frozen laugh.
Time whacks its way
into the void of my life
broken sighs of a treacherous love
in the past, sears my heart.
Tempered with hate
it wets my
sorrows and the sea.
A frightful season
like the shrill of a
hill-area cuckoo,
peaceful and slow.
Time keeps no record
of our rendezvous
or of my lewd thoughts
caught in the sky's stupor
your carved thighs
like floating waves.
Today—countless loves.
Myriads of strange forms
on mysterious mirrors.
You can pat their blood
spy into their ills.
Wind burrs on the spurred
branches, breathless and bright,
its luscent whispers all flying
from unwelcome seasons.
This landscape—better not to have.
This life--better not to live
This earth—better not to touch
My love!
I have layers of sorrows
the sandalpaste of my life.
A throbbing emptiness
of earth in the thirsty seas
circling round my
drab existence.
Darling!
Smile a little, at least for
the sake of my child in your womb
life dribbles out
like drops of tears
in wounded springs.
The tears roll in clouds,
the clouds let loose a river
the river seeps into a sea.
The sea's thick efforts
listlessly hurl the sky
and the sea-bound streams.
DEFINITION
Whatever we have not achieved
so far, is heaven.
Whatever we have left behind is history.
Whatever we have already expressed
is now our silence.
Whatever we failed to articulate hitherto
is poetry.
All our piled up laughter
is now satire, self-deceit.
Whatever unhesitatingly we have gifted away
is our desire, passion.
Whatever we failed to fling apart
is our memory.
Whatever we have survived
is only a deep darkness.
Whatever we have bought so far
is the grocery of our selfishness...
Whatever we have not built so far
is our home.
THE SOLITARY SELF
That is perahaps the first meeting.
For calm appearance of the sea
that swallows layers of civilization
her words
only in her trembling top-like breasts.
She thinks
for the kitten waiting on window sill
stretched flat on its belly like the sunlight
the pregnant cow would turn
into a frightened mouse,
the dark clouds would come flying
into the folds of her eye
like my solitary self.
Have you heard
the stories of vague greatmen?
Red, the horizon
red like fresh blood, have you seen?
The echo of wind
from the breaking mast of a ship?
For the sorrow without anxiety
for the lotus of a rotten pond
for the lovely cloth of a familiar old lady
all the ecstasy,
folded desires
like a mirage of the sky
like a white dream
and very close to us.
Translation :
The poet
BESIDE THE RIVER MAHANADI
Little above Mahanadi
like a holyman in white
the moon watches
even like a constable.
The clouds of a last spring
her sorrows, maybe
the crumbling ant-hills.
As the lonely bed of a princess
this cold sand
that both of you cannot warm.
Go near the old bony bridge
the train crawls slowly,
and the sensuous moments.
In the still, solitary afternoon
waves of illusion
embrace the hot sand.
Grazing, an old cow asks the age of the sand
against the cheerful green around
The water in her eyes lost in them THE NIGHT
1.
Today I have become the night.
Let no light touch me.
Let the meaning I have been cease.
Let my body become a different body.
Let all names signifying me disappear.
Pushed by an irresistible impulse
to become the night
I arrived here.
Let me become the night today.
I have a single aspiration today—
to become the night,
to abolish the ugliness in everything
and install beauty in its place.
2.
How long must I wait
before it is night ?
One cannot recollect the day's looks
unless it is night.
The moon and the stars will not arrive
unless it is night.
The whole sky will be a wilderness
unless it is night.
How do I get the time
to bring back to my mind
your celebrated eyes
unless it is night ?
How can the tuberoses of my steadfast love
blossom into expanding whiteness
unless it is night ?
How long must I wait
before it is night ?
3.
Describing that night is unholy.
Remembering the eyes of that night
is also unholy.
Years pass,but that exquisite night
does not re-enter my mind
that's still, and on the way to holiness.
Some unfinished poem
was inscribed on that night's face.
In the lamplight of my soul
I had once read its lines.
I am the despair of that poem,
and I dissolve
in the night.
I am already an ingredient of the night,
but the splendour of that night
(which, once upon a time,
was my own body's splendour)
does not return,
and years pass.
ON THE MIRROR A NAKED CHILD
On the mirror, a naked child
in the mouth of a snake
on its belly;
no water, no mantra,no one around.
There in the garden
a fear keeps growing.
The shade of a faintly acquainted pomegranate
keeps on lenthening.
The naughty child
boxes the ear of the snake,
the shade goes still
on the boundary.
The naked child
in the mouth of a snake
on its belly
goes on blabbering :
this time I have been caught;
I will not play with you, once again.
No water, no mantra, no one around.
WAR
It's immaterial
as to who loses
and who wins
in the war.
Only that
the earth is soaked,
bathed
in blood, time and again.
Who fights with whom ?
Who is sacrificed?
The war
wipes blue and greenery
from the sky and trees,
breaks the wings of the wind,
throttles the swans
of the rains.
Who fights with whom ?
Who is sacrificed ?
No one on the banks
of the river of blood,
no kith and kin;
afloat on it
rafters of bones,
and bones.
On the edge of the sword
a chunck of flesh
of the earth;
the obssessed warrior
busy in wiping
from it the rust.
It's immaterial
as to who loses,
who wins
in the war.
IF THE WORLD CHANGES
I am not convinced yet
that everything would go wrong
if the world changes.
Even when
the houses are changed into shops
a distrait shopkeeper would surely be there
to stare at the gamesome sparrows in the foliage.
There would still be someone
to hum a forlorn tune to himself
and yet another to run out into the open
to soak himself in the rains.
I am not sure yet that the people
would all go dusty if the world changes itself.
The begging hand of a man
has been the same all through the ages.
People of bowing heads have been retaining
the same postures all along.
The burdened spine, the leaking eyes
and the faces small with disgrace
haven't ever changed a shade.
If ever all the people get cankered down
a few others would still be there
and you would discover they aren't any more the beings
they have very subtly
changed themselves into the snipping sorrows
the unalterable sorrows of this world.
ENTIRELY ABSENTMINDED
An entire life absentminded,
no listing, no counting :
an act of blooming
is no different from flooding,
the music for marriage
is no different from storm,
listening to music
is as good as kissing a thorn;
no stocktaking, everything careless.
Although sometimes
the naughty children
trespass into the garden to play,
the butterflies have adulterous
relationship withs the seasons,
minor like girls,
the pregnancies of the snails
get destroyed,
the heavy steps of the wind
trample pregnant youth,
stones weighing tons
are falling from templetops
and snakes digest what charm them.
Everywhere there is life,
everywhere it is not.
To be entirely
absentiminded is life itself.
There is no record of
what goes on, what is lost
and what can be held in a list.
Tasting the edge of the axe
I, the woodcutter, have
split myself into two :
one the fire, the other the blood.
LET THIS CROW BE KILLED
The crow has started cawing;
it's almost dawn.
Please wake up.
We'll put the bed in order.
Now the eagle-eyed sun will be up.
Come,
let us go to the river.
We will wash
the footprints of sin.
Come,
let us go to the river.
We went to the river.
From the womb of the river
we were born again.
We put
the tassles and flower before the mirror,
we tucked shyness on our faces
and quickly put on
Pressed sari and pyjamas.
Now,
the morning can come,
if it wishes.
What harm the bloody sun
can do to us.
Ah, no sight of morning, or sun!
As usual,
the night is asleep.
Then, does this crow caw
when the night is not yet over ?
Let this crow be murdered.
TRAVELLER
I think
I'd have a word or two with Father
But what words could conspire
between a son and father ?
My father
sees me every day
I see him too
Yet why doesn't a single word
come to my lips,
some word that would
be just right for a father ?
Suddenly confronted by him
my mouth turns sticky and dry,
my tongue rolls like a rope of straw,
the breeze grips the tip of my navel.
Father understands my problem
He watches me, hidden somewhere
He watches me while I am asleep
I think
I'll have a word with Father
My father approaches from a distance
I had never met him
halfway in the street
Father and I
are travellers
I think
I'll have a word or two with Father :
about this undiminished distance between us
which we have kept up, unchanged
through those many roads we have travelled long,
the ache on the soles of our feet
has long since blossomed
into dust-smeared flowers,
the road waiting expectantly for us
day after day !
THAT OLD MAN
ON THE VERANDA OF JUNAGARH BLOCK OFFICE
Does he say something
gesturing his hands, beating his chest ?
A few yards away
is a gathering in the college field;
a mike, a pandal and the shoutings:
you grabbed the Parliament, the Assembly;
now you leave us the local bodies.
That old man still sits
on the veranda of Junagarh Block office.
Look, how eloquently does he speak !
Does he say, the Prime Minister of Fiji
with the Indian origin
is in the clutches of the rebels,
both the Koreas will merge within a year,
hasn't the exchange rate of dollar
gone down in this whole decade ?
Does he say, in our country
the number of political parties,
big and small, is around four hundred;
thirty of them form the government
but the ministry comprises twenty four ?
Does he say, in the women's page of the daily
is the news of the Queen Victoria's lover,
the socialist leader
is away in the U.S. for medical treatment,
his expenses totally borne by the government;
there is pain in his chest.
That old man still sits
on the veranda of Junagarh Block office.
I think, I have seen him somewhere,
or is it his photo that I have seen ?
Did the environmentalists take his snap
on the Narmada Valley ?
Did a photo of his, with an axe
in his hand, appear in the newspaper
when he protested against
the proposed test-firing centre at Chandipur ?
Did he join the opposition party's rally
against the price-rise of the seeds ?
Did he sit on the left side of the bier
of his young son who lost his life
in protest against prawn culture
in the lake Chilika ?
Did he sit, his hand pressed against his chin,
in the national dailies
in one report of proselytization ?
A few yards away
the pandal is agog with speech
whereas the old man on the veranda
goes on shouting nonchalantly.
On his face flashes the face
of an old man who has gone back
dejected for the thirteenth time
without getting his old-age pension,
the face of that poor farmer
who is busy in arranging money
to bribe the officials to get his quota of
fertilizer and seeds,
the face of a young AIDs patient
who had gone to Surat
in search of a job,
the face of the one
rendered homeless in the supercyclone
who now waits for a yard of polythene,
and the face of that labourer
who died of an accident in the Oswal factory
but whose name is not there in the attendance register.
That old man still sits
on the veranda of Junagarh Block office
in Kalahandi.
Bharat,
will your hands ever reach out to him?
SO LATE AT NIGHT
Why should someone arrive
so late at night ?
Nothing to worry, dear,
Sleep for another hour.
One who always wanted to leave
at last flew away
in the right direction.
Tell him to present himself
whenever I wish.
When you get tired
of making the wooden puppets dance,
and sit down under the shadow
of the leafless neem tree,
I will stand up
and announce :
I am here,
alone.
BIRD
The other day we divided our mother
Chhotu claimed seven months
And I took five.
Though the slave of summer and rain
Destroys the bird's home,
Though winter's silent lover
Lays out the dead morning,
Alas!
A bird
Ties the voice of relationship
Holds back tears,
Does not plunder anyone's beauty
Nor squanders anyone's happiness
Does not pile burning coals
On some happy family
At times keeps flying high in the mind's sky
And at others in the deep depths of the soul
Neither any bloodshed for mother
Nor stabbings for wealth
Alas!
A bird goes on singing
For its lost lover.
That day
We lit father's funeral pyre
Chhotu took the plot of land
And I the house,
That very day we divided our mother.
AN ELEGY
Which bird's call-note
possessed me ?
Do you know it
at its time of return
to another guise :
wings of marble,granite claws and beak
and flights, speckles of memories.
The kingfisher calls.
For whose death are you responsible ?
One among many bends
of the river Daya,
the mossy stone under its slow moving water
and in its crevices
fish, legend,sands like history
and a floor of rotten leaves.
In the neck-deep water
if you look this way
a narrow strip of sunshine
where prophecy lies
like a twelve-cubit-span sword.
In the neck-deep water
if you look that way
a small patch of cloud
drifts in like sobbings
and a small fish gets startled.
In space
whose pointed gaze is this ?
And does the river destroy
what it creates ?
THE HOUSE
Sprinkling my impure blood
I have purified my yard
I have arranged rows of wick-lights,
bright with sin,
I have made my nightmares stand,
bowing their heads as arches
and have gone on pouring
the welcome song of liquid silence
from my broken heart.
My house only awaits
the touch of your feet
to be glorified.
I have kept with me
the storm of sighs,
my half-hidden moon
and a tearful rain
so that there will be no omen
on your good wishes for us.
Do I dare to name
this house of pretension
as a temple ?
The only thing is that
on the touch of your feet
my house shall be glorified.
With the delay in your arrival,
the thatch of the house
has started flying off
and the wall collapsing.
The roaring forty has already
announced your non-arrival.
That this house is yours,
the ominous hawk has
gone past, declaring it.
It is to your house
that you should have come.
Why should I be anxious
at all ?
THE STORY OF
A LOWER MIDDLE CLASS FAMILY IN ORISSA
1.
Not an inch of the earth belongs to anybody
We live in a rented house,
have two square meals per day.
Want is sacred like an everyday prayer
of all the family members;
mother worships the god most.
The god is a calendar
or an incomplete wooden toy.
Be He of earth or stone,
my sister smears him with sindoor.
Feigning to be angry with her, father says :
soon I am getting you married off
Yet she builds her sand castles.
All these things sound philosophical to me.
God is a petty tout,
life a semblance to a sand castle.
I make an oratory, sharp like an arrow,
of hunger, dream and unemployment.
Although I am an intellectual
my friends dub me mad.
2.
Father's job and preachings
are morning and evening.
Younger brothers are storms, cut off.
How much of dowry for sister's marriage ?
Will you have balloons, balloons,
red like childhood ?
Will you tuck flowers ?
lock of your hairs in the dark night.
Who will lie on the bier ?
Come, children, sit on my shoulder,
I will take you to the land of moon.
When you are thirsty
I will give you the water of my eyes.
When it's night
you will sleep with my lullabies.
I had seen the map of Orissa
in my school geography book.
How good is my land !
Can I ever forget it ?
The family tears
are like the breaking of the secret rains.
Tell me, who will accompany me
to my house for a day or two.
Don't tell me
that you don't like this story of mine.
|
