Ten days that shook the world

I got my first letter, a boy of fourteen
An eighth grade student, older like a year
The girl as if sheltered to my empty stomach
Like writa, a hunger impassable, but rice.
Not the baked bread crumbs, not fish, neither hominid.
Encumbered to the throat of an enormous flower - I remained
My head sprang out, seeking endlessly all and sundry hours.

Covetous young boys in torn shorts would incite me
My prejudiced hunger watched them gobble in vanity

My body opened a million mouths of hunger, and I roamed

Around alleys far off , my mind a juvenile kingdom - framed

My body to ten different crystals, unvanquished in ten days

That immortality will become the little boy of fourteen

Unerring efflux of writa's aroma - ten days that shook my world.

Figurine

This noon of death I sleeved
Your figurine glittered, poured the all-acquired -
Slying veil of time, murky stellar dust
Depleted on a woman like you.
Tired feet stood on peripheries
Where the ephemeral few ignited
Their leases from their alienation
And heard distinct-discrete arias
Lurking unrest of time past , time you.
And amid such a feast of outsides
I saw immortality of raging sun.

The entangled blue of the sky, the star gestured galaxies
The still grasses of moondance - I indulge in entirely.
Even you're not the pause
Another terminal figure of abyss
Constantly melting to jostles , embracing
Ring of debris, dust and catharsis.

This familiar ephemeral noon , your figurine
Not submissive to the wrinkled tides
But time submits to you - you the death carrier
Silhouetted; today you are dead.

'You'

Concealed wakening you till today - yet today - come gliding.
Scurrying along rails, furtively kissing - costumes of rural mud.
I remember this sundown, the smell of this dark evening
The air of you that floated unbidden, uncertain
Curing thousand unvanquished pauses.
Prickly path of grass, tickling our bare feet
The wrinkled cotton of your skirt crisscrossing .
I've only heard the birds here sing, their names I never knew
And after dusk - scent of this earth rips memories
While the weeping air nests in date palms.
This dark evening, my feet wanders alone in the autumn grass
Few notes freeze in mind, timid birds curtain agility.
In entirety I meet, the phantom of you - marbled in yellow grasses
Trembling like fire, eerie-white as fresh bone.
You that whip me to comfort, you that I create in frozen rhapsodies
An easel to wakeful slumbers , smell that is yet to come.
Smell that wrenches away to foolish grins of flower pots
Smell that is a repose to sudden roars of smoke
And the smell that I lose to sidewalks of crowded many
Concealed wakening you till today - yet today - come gliding.

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.

I can go, but why will I?

I've resolved to turn around.

Muddled my hands in black of dirt,
While time flew unabated.
Never sketched you in my thoughts
As you really are.

Now as I step near the edge of the valley
At this bleak hour of midnight
Moon beckons, in her maiden calls .
Quietly I stand now,with my heavy eyes
Moonlighting by the Ganges,
And all I hear are cries
Reeking of funeral and finitude.

I can go,
To Anywhere, and in any direction.
But, why will I?
.

I will leave,
Perhaps, not just now.
Will carry you along
Won't depart alone, untimely.

translated from bangla
"jete pari kintu keno jabo? " - Shakti Chottopadhyay