Ruskin Bond
Ruskin Bond’s Book of Verse
Contents
About the Author
Introduction
Love
It Isn’t Time That’s Passing
Love Lyrics for Binya Devi
The Love of Two Stars
Lovers Observed
Walnut Tree
Walnut Tree Revisited
Phantom Lover
We Must Love Someone
Love Is a Law
Enough for Me
Nature
Raindrop
Lone Fox Dancing
So Beautiful the Night
The Bat
Walk Tall
Rain in the Hills
Silent Birth
Listen!
Firefly in My Room
Rain
The Owl
The Snail
The Snake
Once You Have Lived with Mountains
The Trees
Butterfly Time
Dandelion
Night Thoughts
Wild Is the Wind
The Whistling Schoolboy
These Simple Things
A Bedbug Gives Thanks
Childhood
Sweet Dolly
Boy in a Blue Pullover
Little One Don’t Be Afraid
View from the Window
Cherry Tree
Kites
I Was the Wind Last Night
Tigers Forever
Evening by the Fireside
Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark
Slum Children at Play
The Pool
Granny’s Proverbs
What Can We Give Our Children?
On Wings of Sleep
Humour
Cricket—Field Placings
A Frog Screams
We Are the Babus
Do You Believe in Ghosts?
The Demon Driver
Foot Soldiers
Self-Portrait
Portents
In Praise of the Sausage
A Nightmare
Granny’s Tree-Climbing
Song for a Beetle
The Cat Has Something to Say
Song of the Cockroach
Travel
Remember the Old Road
Garhwal Himalaya
Parts of Old Dehra
Hill-Station
A Song for Lost Friends
Secondhand Shop in Hill Station
At the Grave of John Mildenhall in Agra
Words to Live By
The Wind and the Rain
Pebbles
One Flower
To Live in Magic
For Silence
Last Words
This Land Is Mine
Dare to Dream
Out of the Darkness
Haikus and Other Verses
Haikus
Out of the Dark
Lost All My Money
If Mice Could Roar
Follow Penguin
Copyright
PENGUIN BOOKS
RUSKIN BOND’S BOOK OF VERSE
Ruskin Bond’s first novel, The Room on the Roof, written when he was seventeen, received the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1957. Since then he has written a number of novellas, essays, poems and children’s books, many of which have been published by Penguin. He has also written over 500 short stories and articles that have appeared in magazines and anthologies. He received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1993, the Padma Shri in 1999 and the Padma Bhushan in 2014.
Ruskin Bond was born in Kasauli, Himachal Pradesh, and grew up in Jamnagar, Dehradun, New Delhi and Shimla. As a young man, he spent four years in the Channel Islands and London. He returned to India in 1955. He now lives in Landour, Mussoorie, with his adopted family.
Introduction
At the end of The Room on the Roof, the novel I wrote more than fifty years ago when I was still in my teens, Rusty and Kishen are trudging back to their ‘home’ in Dehra, and Kishen says: ‘One day you’ll be a writer or an actor or something. Maybe a poet! Why not a poet, Rusty?’ And Rusty smiled. He knew he was smiling because he was smiling at himself.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘why not a poet?’
And that’s where the book ends.
But not the story.
Because Rusty (read Ruskin) did become a writer; but, having to make a living from the written word, he became a writer chiefly of prose; for as we all know, you can’t make a living writing poetry.
But poetry remained my first love, and whenever I felt the urge I put down my thoughts, feelings and observations into verse form, sometimes slipping these poems into my prose works and anthologies when my publishers weren’t looking! I have never had any pretensions to being a serious ‘poet’, which is why I prefer to use the word ‘verse’ to describe my compositions. But I do look upon the world as a poet would, and if there is a lyrical quality to some of my prose it is probably because the poet in me is trying to break free.
Ravi Singh of Penguin India thought it would be a good idea to publish a selection from what I had written over the years, and I thought it would be helpful for the reader if the verses were arranged by theme, with the emphasis on Love, Nature, Childhood, Humour, etc. Meru Gokhale has been very helpful with the selection and arrangement of the verses.
Perhaps Kishen (read Krishan) was being prophetic when he said, ‘Maybe a poet, Rusty…’
Is there still time, I wonder … when we were young, time stretched before us—an infinity of time. It is only we who were finite.
The scruffy Kishen of the The Room on the Roof grew into a successful, handsome young man. But he was barely forty when he perished, while saving a child from drowning.
To his memory, then, I dedicate this book of verse. Perhaps he, more than any other, brought out the poet in me.
Ruskin Bond
19 February 2007
Love
It Isn’t Time That’s Passing
Remember the long ago when we lay together
In a pain of tenderness and counted
Our dreams: long summer afternoons
When the whistling-thrush released
A deep sweet secret on the trembling air;
Blackbird on the wing, bird of the forest shadows,
Black rose in the long ago summer,
This was your song:
It isn’t time that’s passing by,
It is you and I.
Love Lyrics for Binya Devi
1
Your face streamed April rain,
As you climbed the steep hill,
Calling the white cow home.
You seemed very tiny
On the windswept mountainside;
A twist of hair lay
Strung across your forehead
And your torn blue skirt
Clung to your tender thighs.
You smiled through the blind white rain
And gave me the salt kiss of your lips,
Salt mingled with raindrop and mint,
And left me there, where I had come to fetch you—
So gallant in the blistering rain!
And you ran home laughing;
But it was worth the drenching.
2
Your feet, laved with dew,
Stood firm on the quickening grass.
There was a butterfly between us:
Red and gold its wings
And heavy with dew.
It could not move because of the weight of moisture.
And as your foot came nearer
And I saw that you would crush it,
I said: ‘Stay. It has only a few days
In the sun, and
we have many.’
‘And if I spare it,’ you said, laughing.
‘What will you do for me, what will you pay?’
‘Why, anything you say.’
‘And will you kiss my foot?’
‘Both feet,’ I said; and did so happily.
For they were no less than the wings of butterflies.
3
All night our love
Stole sleep from dusty eyes.
What dreams were lost, I’ll never know.
It seemed the world’s last night had come
And there would never be a dawn.
Your touch soon swept the panting dark away—
Some suns are brighter by night than day!
4
Your eyes, glad and wondering,
Dwelt in mine,
And all that stood between us
Was a blade of grass
Shivering slightly
In the breath from our lips.
But grass will bend.
We turn and kiss,
And the world swings round,
The sky spins, the trees go hush
Hush, the mountain sings—
Though we must leave this place,
We’ve trapped forever
In the trembling air
The last sweet phantom kiss.
5
I know you’ll come when the cherries
Are ripe;
But it is still November
And I must wait
For the green fruit to blush
At your approach.
And meanwhile the tree is visited
By robber bands, masked mynas
And yellow birds with beaks like daggers,
Determined not to leave one cherry
Whole for lovers.
But still I wait, hoping one day
You’ll come to stain your lips
With cherry-juice, and climb my tree;
Bright goddess in your dark green temple,
Thrusting your tongue at me.
6
Slender waisted, bright as a song,
Dark as the whistling-thrush at dawn,
Swift as the running days of November,
The Love of Two Stars
Two stars fell in love. Between them came sky
And ten moons and two suns riding high,
Before them the nebulous star-crusted Way,
The silence of Night, the silver of Day.
A million years passed, the lovers still glowed
With the brilliance and fire and passion of old;
But one star grew restless and set off at night
With a wonderful shower of hot white light.
He sped to his love, with his hopes and his fears,
But missed her, alas, by a thousand light-years.
Lovers Observed
Lovers lie drowsy in the grass,
Sunk in bracken, swimming in pools
Of late afternoon sunshine;
All agitation past, they stay totally
Absorbed in grass.
Green grass, and growing from that place
A sweep of languid arm still bare
But for a lost ladybird.
Anonymous lover brushes a dragon
Fly from his face.
Brief thunder blossoms in the air,
A leaf between the thighs is caught
And crushed. Love comes like a thief,
Crouching among the bruised and broken clover.
All flesh in grass.
Walnut Tree
The walnut tree is the first to lose its leaves,
But at the same time the fruit ripens,
The skin splits, the hard shell of the nut
Stands revealed. Yesterday (the last of August)
You climbed among the last few crumpled leaves,
Slim boy in a walnut tree, your toes
Gripping the tender bark, your fingers
Fondling walnuts, while I waited and counted,
And there were twenty-three walnuts on the grass.
We cracked them open with our teeth.
They were still raw but we could not wait:
The walnuts would age and I might grow younger!
Walnut Tree Revisited
You have ripened, since last the walnut tree
Lost its dark leaves, last autumn.
One summer intervened between your growing
And my importunity;
One summer lost,
while walnuts grew;
I too had forgotten.
We saw each other often,
But gone was the magic
Of that first encounter;
And even the tree
Gave little fruit last year.
Now it stands bare-branched
Outside the closed window,
Touched no more by feet and questing fingers,
But turning its own fingers
To the slanting winter sun.
Not one leaf left, where hundreds
Glittered like spears in the forest of September.
But I will wait until the parrots bring
Shrill portents of another spring;
(And I will love you with the same sweet pain,
If you and summer care to visit me again.)
Phantom Lover
Night unto night
When the world’s asleep,
You come to me,
Our tryst to keep.
Held captive, in thrall,
As the stars look down,
Body and soul
From night unto dawn.
Silent you come
And softly you go,
Ours is a love
That none must know.
We Must Love Someone
We must love someone
If we are to justify
Our presence on this earth.
We must keep loving all our days,
Someone, anyone, anywhere
Outside our selves;
For even the sarus crane
Will grieve over its lost companion,
And the seal its mate.
Somewhere in life
There must be someone
To take your hand
And share the torrid day
Without the touch of love
There is no life, and we must fade away.
Love Is a Law
Who shall set a law to lovers?
Love is a law unto itself
Love gained is often lost
And love that’s lost is found again
It’s love that makes the world go round
Love that keeps us closely bound
Take this power to love away
We would be just beasts of prey
Discord would rule the Universe.
Enough for Me
Enough for me that you are beautiful:
Beauty possessed diminishes.
Better a dream of love
Than love’s dream broken;
Better a look exchanged
Than love’s word spoken.
Enough for me that you walk past,
A firefly flashing in the dark.
Nature
Raindrop
This leaf, so complete in itself,
Is only part of a tree.
And this tree, so complete in itself,
Is only part of the mountain.
And the mountain runs down to the sea.
And the sea, so complete in itself,
Rests like a raindrop
On the hand of God.
Lone Fox Dancing
As I walked home last night
I saw a lone fox dancing
In the cold moonlight.
I stood and watched. Then
Took the low road, knowing
The night was his by right.
Sometimes, when words ring true,
I’m like a lone fox dancing
In the morning dew.
So Beautiful the Night
I love the night, Lord.
After the sun’s heat and the day’s work,
It’s good to close my eyes and rest my body.
It’s a good time for small creatures:
Porcupines come out of their burrows
to dig for roots.
The night-jar calls tonk-tonk!
The timid owl peeps out of his hole in the tree trunk
Where he has been hiding all day.
Insects crawl out in thousands.
The wind comes down the chimney
and blows around the room.
I’m watching the stars from my window.
The trees are stretching their arms in the dark
and whispering to the moon.
But if the trees could walk, Lord,
What a wonderful sight it would be—
Armies of pines and firs and oaks
Marching over the moonlit mountains.
The Bat
Most bats fly high,
Swooping only
To take some insect on the wing;
But there’s a bat I know
Who flies so low
He skims the floor;
He does not enter at the window
But flies in at the door,
Does stunts beneath the furniture.
Is his radar wrong,
Or does he just prefer
Being different from other bats?
I’ve grown quite used to him:
He appeals to the paradox in me.
And when sometimes
He settles upside down
At the foot of my bed,
I let him be.
On lonely nights, even a crazy bat
Is company.
Walk Tall
You stride through the long grass,
Pressing on over fallen pine-needles,
Up the winding road to the mountain-pass:
Small red ant, now crossing a sea
Of raindrops; your destiny
To carry home that single, slender
Cosmos seed,
Waving it like a banner in the sun.
Rain in the Hills
In the hushed silence of the house
when I am quite alone, and my friend, who was here,
has gone, it is very lonely, very quiet,
as I sit in a liquid silence, a silence within,
surrounded by the rhythm of rain
the steady drift
of water on leaves, on lemons, on roof,
drumming on drenched dahlias and window panes,
while the mist holds the house in a dark caress.
As I pause near a window, the rain stops.
And starts again.
And the trees, no longer green but grey,
menace me with their loneliness.
Silent Birth
When the earth gave birth to this tree,
There came no sound:
A green shoot thrust
In silence from the ground.
Our births don’t come so quiet—