Beyond Land and Time

Standing Before Time

(Shômôyer Kāchє)

Translated by Sudeshna Chakravarti

Standing before time, we must bear witness

To what we have done and what we have thought.

All those single days perhaps

On some sea beach or on a mountain,

Familiar today, lit with a blue glow,

Are lying like bony gravel

Yet counting for ever the days of their own

Lifetime—moving far away from the azure,

Disappearing from the light of the sun;

That day, there was nothing in the papyrus or the printing press;

After ancient China, the China of the latest century

Was lost that day.

Yet today I am a man,

The harvest from the path of the autumn pulse

In the heart of creation;

And the future skeleton on this humankind;

And the ardent wait

To learn the paths

For new men—new, new men

To learn—to wish to learn the paths,

And barring the way forward,

The endless hunger for food:

(Why this hunger—

why endless?)

the leftovers of those who have got everything,

the refuse of those who have got nothing:

I am all this.

Beside the sea of time

In tomorrow’s white sea bird, someone

With two wings outspread from his breast,

Lighting somewhere the bright flame of life,

Thinks that courage, desires, dreams exist.

Le him think so—the living symbol

Victory to him in every age!—

Not the dodo bird.

Men have been born again and again

In the lifetime of this earth,

Have moored on new shores of history:

Yet where is the success

Of the transcending dream?—the freshness,

The dawn of unblemished humanity?

Have the mental worlds of Nachiketa, Zarathustra,

Lao-Tse, Michelangelo, Rousseau, Lenin, by their invasion

Ushered in our memorable century?

In the darkness we seem to feel

The confident blow of the Father-Spirit of History,

However we might long to rest in peace;

Nowhere without strife,

Without any strife does the sunlight advance.

O stellar Orion, we must ascend into the lap

Of eternal conflict, singing the praise of motion—

We have left the sea-shore in this fluent festival;

Does the war of mankind gradually weaken

With every new wave, sunlight, revolution,

Unity? Does the nation of man

Unite more and more deeply? Will not the day

Of man’s awakening, trouncing new words of death,

Words of blood, words of fear—however famed

For immeasurable thought, will it not still

Be renewed in the realm of history, having known man—

Still for the sake of every being’s sixty springs?

In all those deep commencements—the consciousness

‘There is, there is, there is’, there move the stars;

night, sea, order, man’s possessions, his heart.

Victory to the setting sun, victory

To the unblemished rising sun—Victory!