Translated from the Telugu by N. Venugopal

Poetry

Poetry is
Truth that need not be concealed
People who do not need a government
Life that doesn’t need ambrosia

If you search my pockets
Ransack the books and papers on my table
Racks on the shelves
Pry open my flower-like heart cage
You’ll find no other secret than poetry

The influence of all my dangerous personalities
That you do not understand
Is the secret of poetry

Look carefully
It’s like moonlight trapped in a rectangle.
In your arrogance you look up to insult me
See
My poetry shines in the blue sky like a full moon
Surprisingly
You’re shocked to see the moon now unable to
See his own light in this cell here

I used to feel disgusted as if swarmed by cockroaches
Whenever you were combing my body
Now
After I’d poured out all my blood
And transfused it with poetry
To be company in my solitude
I pity that you searched my lap for your lost child, humanity
When you grope around my neck
Your metal detectors tremble on my chest
I surrender myself to you
As if I am exploring my own secret worlds
Uncovering myself and peeling my own skin
To hear my own poetic voice
To feel the attraction in touch
Poetry descends like a heavy weight
Onto your hand that shackles me
And whenever I move
Chains make the noise of soaring free birds

The prosecution’s conspiracies are revealed
In the daylight of court

You can try surveillance
Poetry will still be ignited and kept aflame
You can try governance
Poetry will talk about people even in your sleep
You can prime the death trap net and keep waiting
Poetry shall swim into consciousness facing your gaze

Poetry is an open secret that annuls the state
Even as it’s taking shape in my heart
It reaches those it has to
It is understood by the deserved unconsciously
Even as it is rising in my imagination
It inspires movements
The secret is that
My poetry was born with the movement’s first milk

My poetry
Continues to flow like a blood letter stream
Out of your hands that sealed mine
Like a broken string of pain and threads of anger
Like the sight that lights
Tears.

30 December 1987

Kavitvam from Muktakantham, 1990

_

CHAINS WRITE NOW

So far
Blooming flowers and broadcast perfumes
Made me write
Now
It is your lies that force me to write
The Truth

So far
Breathless agitations and excitement
Made me stand upright and drove me
Now
Your imprisonment and iron heels
Suffocate(?) and turn me metal

You encroach my expansive world
Cut it into small tiny cells
Imprison me immobile in a cell
And warn me if I ever infringe
You know my hand is inside the cell
And it’s you who tied it down
It’s you who broke my pen

But then you are upset that the waves of
My dreams are spreading
I sit cringed in this dark cell
On this path that I’ve travelled
I am neither the first nor the last
My song has its own feet
As it was born on that path
Whatever should I do
You charge my dreams
I can only laugh at you

You raised high walls around me
My eyes learned to look at the world
From the high skies
I was in my routine life with my sights upon the earth
Your walls turned me an introvert
Rising high into the skies of the winged birds

As much as you moved away from people
To protect your power
I moved to the belief that
People, people alone can destroy fascism

Even your shadow may not tell you the truth
It may be telling you whatever you want to hear
But you are alone in the outside world
Here inside I am among innumerable people
I am with the strength of my beliefs
I am, with the power of the people a volcano
That erupts lava and fumes tomorrow
Even if it appears silent today

In this long silent imprisonment
I am honing my thoughts
Dictator, now my chains are writing
Tomorrow I will sing full throated in freedom.

February 14, 1977

ippuDu sankeLlu raastunnaayi from Swechcha