TH R E E P O E M S O F H O P E by K. Satchidanandan

 

awaited your cupped hands
to stop ther fall midway!
Don’t you hear the sea whisper,
debts are not to be repaid?
Even your dark little room
has a piece of sky.
Everything is blessed:
fish,cicadas,sedges,
sunlight,lips,words.

AT TIMES

At times it is good to laugh,
Even the moment before
you take your life,for,
the sun survives you;
fishermen still set their tiny boats
on the raging sea;
the drowned man’s clothes
learn to fly about on the riverbank;
a man and woman blossom
into heaven from the bed of misery;
a boy riding the noon
dreams of caparisoned elephants;
a girl breathes orange blossoms
and slowly turns into a breeze;
a homebound bird
deposits four blue eggs
and a star in the twilight;
on the lips of a happy drunk,
Saigal trembles like the moon in a river (1)
a poem slips past a banyan tree
hiding its face in an umbrella;
a raindrop turning into
an emerald on a colocasia leaf
remembers Kunhiraman Nair (2)

THOSE WHO GO

Let them go who want to;
turn your eye towards those
who remain.Look into the mirror:
an angel watches you from within,
whispering to you in your
own voice, ‘Live, live on’.

Listen to silence;
it is an uproar-
a cascade, like your beloved
bursting into laughter,
stroking her hair backward;
the dance of leaves;
the wind’s anklet;the song of survivors
from beyond the river; the new year
arriving with a round of claps,
and flowers hanging from its ears.

There is no yesterday,nor tomorrow;
only the doors of today opening
to the sky.And smells: wet hay,
grain boiling,rain-washed earth,
elanji,areca flowers,cardamom,
serpents’ eggs, the mysterious
secretions of trees and men.


I will not sleep tonight,
nor will I let you.

(Translated from Malayalam by the poet)

2003

(1)Saigal, a legendary Hindistani singer.
(2) P. Kunhiraman Nair, the famous Malayalam poet of Kerala’s vanishing
landscapes.