Beyond Land and Time

(Bôrô Bôrô Gāch)

Translated by Salimullah Khan

They are felling big, real big trees down there.

It was my desire that reared them, these tall real tall trees up

My body smells of blood-smeared wood,

My mind’s lack is like that lack also known as cities and civilizations

In daylight

Or in a glow of stars aglow night after night

These trees, dead trees, I hold fast in my stare.

Some, I don’t know who, somewhere still dedicate hymns to progress

Raise monuments to Communism

To this day mankind works hard to put human beings on foot.

I faced for long: tall real tall trees on foot

I did face them, tall real tall trees amidst crows crowding

On foot turned they blue and saffron

Even so, then, I did face them: on the night-sea’s other shore

Trees—each one—as if quiet, hidden islands

Tell your heart to drift heavenward away.

A leaf, a drop of life’s stream drops dead and apart

Getting one is getting it all, a last fruit,

That arrives at a world of dreams—in the dark’s dorm.

On two cheeks it all dries up, I know it,

a river or a deep blue sea too.

The mind too, leaving a corpse back on the pyre, disappears.

Life after life, still in love with one life after another

Yet we—you and I—have no time that runs out of us.