‘Prose, when you recite it,
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Can take on the colour of poetry.’
And she throws her arms round my neck and hugs me.
I quip, ‘Are you trying to transfer some of that poetic colour
From my throat into your arms?’
She answers, ‘That’s not how a poet should talk:
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I’m the one who passes the touch of poetry into your voice:
I may even have awoken song.’
I listen in silence, too happy to reply.
I say to myself – The aloofness of nature
Is constant, like a mountain it looks down loftily
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From numberless accumulated years.
But my śunāyanī,
Morning star,
Can lightly and suddenly scale its immensity;
And time’s great disregard surrenders to that instant.
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Poet of Mohenjodaro, your evening star
Has passed through its setting
To surmount again the crest of morning
Here in my life.
New Birth
New deliverer –
The new age eagerly looks
To the path of your coming.
What message have you brought
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To the world? In the mortal arena
What seat has been prepared for you?
What new form of address
Have you brought to be used
In the worship of God in Man? What song of heaven
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Have you heard before coming?
What great weapon for the fighting of evil
Have you placed in the quiver, bound to the waist
Of the young warrior?
Will you, perhaps, where a tide of blood besmirches your path,
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Where there is malice and discord,
Construct a dam of peace,
A place of meeting and pilgrimage?
Who can say if there is written on your forehead
The invisible mark
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Of the triumph of some great striving?
Today we search for your unwritten name:
You seem to be just off the stage,
Like an imminent star of morning.
Infants bring again and again
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A message of reassurance –
They seem to promise deliverance, light, dawn.
Flying Man
Satanic machine, you enable man to fly.
Land and sea had fallen to his power:
All that was left was the sky.
God has given as a gift a bird’s two wings.
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From the flash of feathery line and colour
Spiritual joy springs.
Birds are companions to the clouds: blue space
And great winds and brightly-coloured birds
Are all of the same race.
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The rhythms in the life and play of birds belong
To the wind; from the sky’s music comes
Their energy and song.
Thus each dawn throughout the forests of the earth
Light, when it wakes, unites with birdsong
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In one harmonious birth.
In the great peace beneath the immense sky,
The dancing wings of birds quiver
Like wavelets rippling by.
Age after age through birds the life-spirit speaks:
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It is carried by birds along tracks of air
To far-flung forests and peaks.
Today what do we see? And what is its meaning?
The banner of arrogance has taken wing,
Proud and overweening.
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This thing has not been blessed by the life-divinity.
The sun disowns it, neither does the moon
Feel any affinity.
In the brutal roaring of an aeroplane we hear
Incompatibility with sky,
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Destruction of atmosphere.
High among the clouds, in the heavens, its din
Adds new blasphemous grating laughter
To man’s catalogue of sin.
I feel the age we live in is drawing to a close –
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Upheavals threaten, gather the pace
Of a storm that nothing slows.
Hatred and envy swell to violent conflagration:
Panic spreads down from the skies,
From their growing devastation.
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If nowhere in the sky is there left a space
For gods to be seated, then, Indra,
Thunderer, may you place
At the end of this history your direst instruction:
A last full stop written in the fire
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Of furious total destruction.
Hear the prayer of an earth that is stricken with pain:
In the green woods, O may the birds
Sing supreme again.
Railway Station
I come to the station morning and evening,
I love to watch the coming and going –
Hubbub of passengers pressing for tickets,
Down-trains boarded, up-trains boarded,
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Ebb and flow like an estuarine river.
Some people sitting there ever since morning,
Other people missing their train by a minute.
Day – Night – clanking and rumbling,
Trainloads of people thundering forth.
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Changing direction at every moment,
Eastwards, westwards, rapid as storms.
The essence of all these moving pictures
Brings to my mind the image of language,
Forever forming, forever unforming,
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Continuous coming, continuous going.
Crowds can fill the stage in an instant –
The guard’s flag waves the train’s departure
And suddenly everyone disappears somewhere.
The hurry disguises their joys and sorrows,
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Masks the pressure of gains and losses.
Bho – Bho – blows the whistle,
Ruled by the clock’s division of time.
No one can bear to wait for a second,
Some get aboard, some stay behind.
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Succeeding, failing, boarding or remaining,
Nothing but picture after picture.
Whatever catches the eye for a moment
Is erased the next moment after.
A whimsical game, a self-forgetting
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Ever-dissolving sequence –
Each canvas ripped, its shreds discarded
To pile up along the roadside,
Detritus lifted hither and thither
By tired hot summer breezes.
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‘Hold back, hold back,’ rings out the clamour
Of passengers left stranded –
Next thing they have also vanished,
Chasing, running, wailing.
Clang – Clang – sounds the tocsin,
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Time for good-bye, off goes the train.
Passengers leaning out of the windows,
Waving until they are whisked away.
The world is merely the work of a painter,
This is the truth I have accepted –
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Not made by a craftsman, beaten and moulded,
Not a thing the hand can grip hold of,
But an insubstantial visual sequence.
Age follows age never losing momentum,
A stream of forming and passing pictures.
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Alone in the midst of the to-ing and fro-ing
I watch the constant flux of the station.
One – brush – the picture
is painted,
Another brush blacks it out again.
Who are those coming from one direction?
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Who are those floating the other way?
Freedom-bound
Frown and bolt the door and glare
With disapproving eyes,
Behold my outcaste love, the scourge
Of all proprieties.
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To sit where orthodoxy rules
Is not her wish at all –
Maybe I shall seat her on
A grubby patchwork shawl.
The upright villagers, who like
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To buy and sell all day,
Do not notice one whose dress
Is drab and dusty-grey.
So keen on outward show, the form
Beneath can pass them by -
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Come my darling let there be
None but you and I.
When suddenly you left your house
To love along the way,
You brought from somewhere lotus honey
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In your pot of clay.
You came because you heard I like
Love simple, unadorned –
An earthen jar is not a thing
My hands have ever scorned.
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No bells upon your ankles so
No purpose in a dance -
Your blood has all the rhythms
That are needed to entrance.
You are ashamed to be ashamed
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By lack of ornament -
No amount of dust can spoil
Your plain habiliment.
Herd-boys crowd around you, street-dogs
Follow by your side –
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Gipsy-like upon your pony
Easily you ride.
You cross the stream with dripping sari
Tucked up to your knees –
My duty to the straight and narrow
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Flies at sights like these.
You take your basket to the fields
For herbs on market-day –
You fill your hem with peas for donkeys
Loose beside the way.
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Rainy days do not deter you –
Mud caked to your toes
And kacu-leaf upon your head,
On your journey goes.
I find you when and where I choose,
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Whenever it pleases me -
No fuss or preparation: tell me,
Who will know but we?
Throwing caution to the winds,
Spurned by all around,
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Come, my outcaste love, O let us
Travel, freedom-bound.
Yaka
No pause in the passage of the Yaka’s yearning on towards Alakā,
Borne by impatient winds,
From mountain to mountain,
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Forest to forest.
A careering crane’s-wing-flap of joy, tuned to the music
Of the heart-rending sighs of the shadow-cast rains,
Flies to ever-far heaven
Along with his longing;
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A high beauty forever accompanies his deep pain.
A huge separation dwells at the heart of onward time
That tries door after future door,
Life after future life
In an endless attempt to close its distance from perfection.
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The world is its poem, a rolling sonorous poem
In which a remote presage of joy annotates vast sorrow.
O blessed Yaksa -
The fire of creation is in his yearning.
Where silently his beloved waits, watching the minutes,
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The long days move.
Her room is closed: no road to look out on –
Her hope,
Worn out by waiting, lies in the dust.
The poet has given her pining no language,
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Her love no pilgrimage –
For her, the unspeaking Yaksa city
Is a meaningless prison of riches.
Permanent flowers, eternal moonlight –
Mortal existence knows no grief as great as this:
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Never to awake from dreams.
God has granted that the Yaka may pound her door with yearning.
He longs to sweep his beloved
Away on the surging stream of his heart,
Away from the motionless mounts of heaven
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Into the light of this many-coloured, shadow-dappled mortal world.
Last Tryst
Ink-black clouds banked in the north-east:
The force of the coming storm latent in the forest,
Waiting as quietly as the bats hanging
In the branches. Darkness blanketing
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Dense leaves that are still and silent
As a crouching tiger intent
On its prey. Flocks of crows
Suddenly aloft in a craze
Of fear, like tattered
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Shreds of darkness littered
Over the void of a cosmos
Broken into chaos.
Where have you come from today in the guise
Of a storm, your unbound hair scented with past wild flowers?
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In my youth you came once before on another
Day, first messenger
Of the freshly shining Spring.
You brought the first flowering
Jasmine of Ãsārh, you were indescribably lovely.
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You blossomed in my heart,
In my boundless wonder: I do not know from what
Radiant world unseen
You came into the light of vision.
You meet me today by a path no less mysterious.
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How potent your face
Appears in the brief lightning-flame!
How novel its expressions seem!
Is the path by which you come today
The same as I knew before?
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I see
Sometimes its faint outline;
Sometimes not the slightest hint or glimmer can be seen.
You have brought in your basket flowers recalled or forgotten,
But others I have never hitherto known;
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And in your fragrance you carry