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.

0 comments: