Hearing the chime the birds returned home,
The mellowing west following the eastern gloom,
And stillness.
Adieu, my sun, for this day!
But it rose again the morning next,
And the same birds sprawled across the sky.
Welcome, welcome another day!
But my parting hour shall not shift fate,
And my farewell is beyond the welcome song.
Way ahead is my new home,
And I hate to leave my world behind.
Life- it goes on, only men do die;
But come back, as I will;
Some day in future I will try.
-1\10\97, Calcutta-43
COMMENTS :
Leaving a place old, especially one with many
associations is a very painful experience. The old places, the old
faces beckon one’s heart to itself through nostalgia and tears
of longing. This poem was written just before leaving Garden Reach
for my new home at Thakurpukur. But places must be left behind in
life’s onward march. That is the price one must pay for living.
In fact, the going to a new place is a new experience, even
educative, and so is not always to be abhorred. But then how often
has the heart been pacified with logic when it is crying for lost
treasures. Thus too Charles Lamb lamented in his
‘The Old Familiar Faces’:
"I have had playmates, I have had
companions
In my days of childhood, in my joyful school-days;
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
I have been laughing, I have been carousing,
Drinking late, sitting late, with my bosom cronies;
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
I loved a love once, fairest among women:
Closed are her doors on me, I must not see her-
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces."
Finally, acceptance is the rule of life. At
least resignation. Thus:
My childhood world is deep down the seabed…
Where once at dawn the waking cocks would crow,
Where rye once ripened and blue forests murmured,
The fishing nets sway in the current below.
Without the bitterness of wrong inflicted,
You look into the depths with saddened eyes.
Imagining the humble thatch of rooftops
Where now a days a village Atlantis lies.
The wind is rising. In between black piles,
Foam white as cotton wool is briskly churning.
Sleep on, Atlantis. Sleep, and do not surface,
For what is sunken, there is no returning.
- ‘My childhood world’, probably by Victor
Astafiev
