|
|
Chandrakant Deotale
Born Again
I forget ways
And therefore come upon new ways
I get out of my own sleep to enter
Someone else’s sleep
That’s how one continues to be born again
I am one of those people
To whom it is an embarrassment
To be born only once in a lifetime
And to die just one time
Even then for me to say anything about life
Would be like merely pointing at places on a map
It is too hard to tell
Where love was and in what colours
And what was it then that occupied the absence of love
There are too many shadows inside water, sleep and darkness
And they intertwine amongst themselves like roots of ancient
trees
It’s such a complicated mess
I can’t even pull out one or two of them
To show out in the open
The river that I dive into is such
That by the time I surface again
Either it is a changed city
Or the colour of another river
Any time it starts to turn into evening
And not one of those can be found anywhere
Who make
The stone of loneliness glow
Translated by Dilip Chitre
Nandi Path
Now is the time
when only those
can listen to poetry
who do not think
through their overfull bellies
The time now is not Time
but a case
where one either testifies
or becomes dumb forever.
A Minor Difficulty With The Two Of Us
Only if I had a bit of land
I would have got
a hut built
I could have borrowed a few bricks
from the potter
The only thing I lack is bamboos.
He asserted and I
kept on wondering
Only if I had some bamboos to give him
He could have managed bricks on loan
from the potter
A pretty little hut could have come up—
Only he hasn't any land.
Then we went on looking at
the sea, the sky, and the endless earth
These three didn't belong to anyone
Therefore we blurted
'It is our sea, our sky,
the earth is ours'.
We couldn't have had the three
in our fists, eyes or arms
Nor could we have sold
a part of the sea
a piece of the sky or the earth
This way we were masters of the infinite
with only a slight trouble
with the two of us—
He had no land
And I had no bamboos
|
|
|
|
|
