TRANSLATED FROM THE BENGALI BY MANDAKRANTA SEN

 

 

We

 

Meat and liquor and throwing at one another dirt

This, also is, a playful love

 Anything like a poet or weapon-

I approach them as if they were art

Still, smelling odour of the dead 

Wayward shadows come home 

Even the futile nights gradually learn 

Some people throw up blood instead

Like this the dusk flows

One part fame and one part fear of death 

Getting through it come 

and mix with the mates

Eventually all 

my foes

 

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The Comeback

 

O burnt cloud of the night 

You have descended

With stored anxiety of days, your stooped down head 

Yet the heat of extinguishing, the Palash, dishevelled 

Only a meadowish moon, what it was supposed to – gave

You are being lost in the cloud, with your olden age, and loads of enchantment

As daytime grows in your bosom, the wind is not competent 

The eyes are glowing, yet, you see

Another windpipe is hacked

Just like the rain takes place another comeback

 

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Maternity Leave

 

I won’t go to school, neither you to your office. 

I will swim for ten years 

In your lap in the murky darkness, for long ten years

I will be blended with that blood. 

I will be smeared with your nausea and agony. 

Then what a wailing, you know 

Both of us 

Blazing so fiercely 

No, not under the scalpel of a surgeon, but we will throw ourselves 

Violently on the sand of a seashore, and waves would come and wash away 

All our filth. You will lull me to sleep day and night. You will full me in your lap 

And see what a glutton I am, I will grab your right breast, 

And suck in one breath from the other…

The whole lifetime will come to an end drinking in turns like this 

I would never go to school, and you would have a lifetime of maternity leave….

 

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Insomnia

 

So, you are shutting down, realizing the end 

Catching a glimpse of that illuminated turn-

Is it wrong?…I feel so, my friend Froth adhering to my abode, for days 

No sea beaches, that’s far away, and impossible to graze

Windhouse, without touch, sweet colours of yours. 

Pervading the aloof circle, a fragrance which one adores

Winding and winding beyond the night 

Wash away scars of burn with rumpled brown high tide

Like this, along the edge, two buds of sadness, so lonely

She has sucked the pulp, of which, the secluded rooftop is aware only 

Is it just illusion of the night, leaming the brinks of the body of late 

You have been burnt craving for sleep. 

The line of fate.

 

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Song

 

Some evenings are so lonely

Just to give a song to listen to 

Birds, amorous with moonlight

Come out to decorate the garden

 I too, am somehow like a human,

So, in the queue for auto rickshaw 

At ten o’clock in the night.

feel, some evenings are born 

Just to transform themselves into music

Some evenings, because of there incapability to do that, 

Go by… just

go by

 

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