Short Poems

cold afternoon~
a toddler holding her arms
licks his running nose.

Every year when I show balance sheet of loan, you say-
I’ll clear all this year. But Invitation card of the Year-end
And New Year is sent back from your address
The old peon says smiling
May be the address is wrong
My balance sheet is not updated.
I never have mistaken your address

A name I’ve written on a blade of grass
On the date my mother breathed her last.


[Translated from 'Batshorik' (Bengali) by Oindrila Mukherjee]

It happened that sometimes I kissed in mirrors the reflection of my face, since the hands, face and tears of Annalena had caressed it, it seemed to me divinely beautiful as if suffused with heavenly sweetness. I liked her velvet wetness, long voyages in the delta her legs. A striving upstream toward her beating heart through more and more savage currents saturated with the light of hops and bindweed. And our vehemence and triumphant laughter and our hasty dressing in the middle of the night to walk on the stone stairs of the upper city.

They all gather round the man in his seventies
Who is on a fast-unto-death against the muck:

I hear the flutter of a change in the spring wind!

------
(Written on 6.4.2011 in honour of the social activist Anna Hazare, for his fast against corruption at Jantar Mantar, New Delhi.)

"இப்பொழுதும்
அங்குதான்
இருக்கிறீர்களா? "
என்று
கேட்டார்
"எப்பொழுதும்அங்குதான் இருப்பேன்"
என்றேன்.

Keep thou
Thy tearless watch
All night but when blue-dawn
Breathes on the silver moon, then weep!
Then weep!

Rash, angry words, and spoken out of season,
When passion has usurp'd the throne of reason,
Have ruin'd many. Passion is unjust,
And for an idle, transitory gust
Of gratified revenge, dooms us to pay
With long repentence at a later day.

So silent I when Love was by
He yawned, and turned away;
But Sorrow clings to my apron-strings,
I have so much to say.

And though my love abounding,
Did make me fall a sounding,
Yet am I well contented,
Still so to be tormented,
And death can never fear me,
As long as you are near me.