Reign over me

That you do not know, yet in unknowing
All of my songs surround you
When I will be scattered, tumbled in autumn storm
Will you then - like stray leaves on streets
Lie flat, marbled upon me ?
Torpid repose of slumber , cloudy and numb
Will then satiate you?
The inveterate dues that you owe to life
Will them then simply expire?
Nightly dews - smeared on my breast
Only merely , you desired the same?
A mere flavour of that night - can then reconcile you?
I will wither away - yet life incessant whirls on
Vagaries of that day shelter you timeless, yet
My songs - they all surround you.

Amid green meadows I lie - over green grasses
Sky sprinkled blue from skies to skies
Yet what we gather of ephemeral colors,
Touching and retouching, is but a mere wonder.
In that wonder, visions starve directionless.
Relics of eroded earth part the grasses
While by the shore - your feet meanders
Like a stranger to the tumultuous waves.
Walking endlessly , night to night, amid interstellar domes, galaxies.
Then your fragile skeletons go marching
In the abyss of human hearts -
Silently, muter than galaxies
Amid shadowless cemeteries, around solitary epitaphs.

The Gods converse once, gods of countries and directions
Ending mute, forgetting all that is said and thought.
Reign of fire, burning beneath their eyes
Quenched then, drowned, streamlining into oblivion.
New desires - they come, a new moment lingers
Old days of galaxies expire.
You remain warm in your sky
Skies outside freeze
Stars decay, new stars reign over me
Vagaries of that decay shelter you timeless, yet
My songs - they all surround you.

Thousand years merely play

Thousand years merely play,
Thousand years merely play like fireflies in darkness
World around culminates - to bare coffins
Moonlight sprinkles upon sand - Shadowy date palms fumble
Death humbled, like disintegrated columns
Pale , stagnant, mute and pyramidal.
Bodies reek of slumber, Life's transactions expire
"Remember?", asked he
I merely queried, "Banalata Sen?"

Your bare lonely hand

Darkness thickens in the sky
Smoky and mysterious, fraternal to the light.

She who loved me always
Whose face I'm yet to see,
Like that woman in oblivion
Falgun sky hides - in continual darkness.

And my thoughts linger on a certain city
Extinct in time - the gray palaces,
The majestic walls - ruminates the mind.

Along the coasts of Indian Ocean
Or the Mediterranean shores
Or, by the shingle of Indus
Which eclipsed today, but
Existed once - a city of gray dreams
A palace - coquettish , ornamented -
A french carpet, few Kashmiri shawls
My usurped heart, my dead eyes, my lost desires to dream
And you, woman -
All these once suffused that world.
There were many-a scarlet evenings
When frolicing pigeons stealthily came
Around countless teaks, shadowed in mehagony.


There came many a crimson noons
Many a crimson noons
And you!
Your face - the finesse that I do not behold for centuries,
I do not search.

Dark Falgun brings stories of that seashore
The solitary lines of sorrow, vagaries of domes and arches
The forgotten scent of pears
Numerous deer and lion parchments, graying in time.
Rainbow drenched glass windows
Colorful draperies akin to peacock feathers
Abyss of old rooms that separates us from other abysses
A faint glimpse , wonderings
Silence immortal , momentary musings!

Noon comes - its scarlet hues smeared
On the draperies, carpeted mozaic floors.
Wine - blood red in that ruby glass
And your bare lonely hand;

Your bare lonely hand.

-----x-------------

Translated.

~"Nogno nirjon haat" (Jibonananda Das)


P.S. Falgun - first month of spring.