Beyond Land and Time

Had I Been

(Āmi Jodi Hotām)

Translated by Golam Mustafa

Had I been a wild gander

And you a goose

Somewhere beside the Jalshiri river of a horizon

Near the paddyfield

Inside the slender reed

In a solitary nest.

Had it been so, now at this Falgoon night

Having seen the moon rising behind the tamarisk trees

We leaving the smell of the marshy water

Would float across the silvery harvest of the sky—

My feathers inside your wings, the throbbing of your

blood in mine—

The countless stars like the golden flowers of a bursting field

in the blue sky.

In the hairy nest of the raintree forest

Like an egg of gold

Shines the Falgoon moon.

May be a sound of bullets:

The stream of our oblique movement,

The delight of the piston in our wings,

And in our voice the song of the northern wind.

May be a sound of bullets again:

Our motionlessness,

Our tranquility.

This piecemeal death as ‘tis now would no more be there,

Nor would there be the futility of trifle longings and darkness

of day-to-day life;

Had I been a wild gander,

And you a goose;

Somewhere beside the Jalshiri river of a horizon

Near the paddyfield.