Beyond Land and Time

 

 

 

 

Townish Forever

(Rupôshi Bānglā Shôngjôjon 11: Cirodin Shôhôrei Thāki)

 

Translated by Golam Mustafa

 

 

Always in the town, and nowhere else

I stay inside the jute godown

Work as office clerk—if somehow

Days can just pass

Under the sky

What the stars in heaven tell each other

Why inertia of life

Aches in the moonlight

I need no bother.

 

Once I was married—the wife is dead

Although honey flower blooms in the mahua tree

Fallen once, still

Mahua is Mahua again: the clerk’s house

Is just a clerk’s house, alas

A hearty episode happens once—only once, then

In the blue mist it dies at last.

 

I mind to gods

No pilgrimage till then

As you stay content with deities

Yet once in a holiday on a tour

Went a little distance—Tarokeswar

In deep desirelessness—reluctant

Boarded a train

In noise, in smoke, in dust

Why do people long for it.

 

I know not the God—I know only the hungry god

And that on purification for the daily life I’ll find salvation

Then oneday at Nimtala shore

Or in the locality of Kashi Mitra

Will lay dead.

 

Till now as I return home late

That place flashes in mind: in Tarokeswar

Who searched for a god, I spent days in paths

In the exhausted fields of dust

In the midst of crowds innumerable

Then a face I saw and stopped

I caught sight of her near the lion’s image,

It seemed that in the past I had seen her at the feet of        

            gods in Ashyria Babylon

Saw her in Egypt

In the house of Issis

Day long—at this Tarokeswar for the whole day

I saw her again, (Aha),

 

In the silent afternoon waters of Dhanshiri river

These eyes like cane fruits, that beauty

Surrendering to the silent end cloth of the earth

I beheld that

And again saw her face, aha!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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