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To a Brother
Mridul Haloi
The grass,
beginning to sprout,
in our winter-fields,
abound.
Like a seed,
in a granary,
my words
silently slumber.
Does yours too?
The mid-day rolling upon
The sundried paddy's mat is
Of those old times itself.
Only the two boys—
Who are running breathlessly
Along the paddy field lanes
Are not us— are like us.
Mangoes are budding
In our homestead land of those bygone years
The warble of a dove
pierces through the evenfall.
And the baritone you left
to my heart to make inroads
lingers till date..
From where the lamps
of our eyes cannot meet,
You, I know,
Still hear the birdie chirp.
And rummage in the grass
for a lost fig.
And here,
I all alone hunt for
the red dragonfly
that eluded us
after a chase of
seven stretched fields.
Thick paddies are swinging in our fields
The sprouts of the preserved words
In our hearts are restless
Like seeds in the granary
Your breath cleaves through my heart.
The two boys running after
The red dragonfly
are so much like us of those yester years
The same old fly,
and two lads,
get blurred
by two drops of tears
I cannot keep at bay.
(Translation : Jyotirmoy Talukdar)
HOME
Mridul Haloi
We have chucked in
the old dwelling
and sitting on the
stainless tiles of a new one,
are ruminating upon
the relinquished home
that dad erected before
assigning a sapling the job at its threshold.
And mom as a bride
entered it veiled.
The petals from the sun flew
to the veranda tidied by her,
as she untied her locks
and their umbra.
At the moonlit nights
the sapling branched off
in the reveries of
my genitors.
The areca-nut developed calyxes
for many twelvemonths.
The betels mellowed and withered.
The home
dad protected with
portals and walls
gradually
aged.
We have decamped
from the old home.
The fallen leaves
strewn on its entrance
veil the grass
that has lately turned green.
We no more wade across
the threshold to reach
the deserted lodging.
With novel colours and beams
our new home gleams.
We have knocked together
a new threshold.
Have planted trendy saplings
and fashionable doorways and gateways,
helping it look cosy.
Our veranda is brushed
by the laughters of our boys
like by tides.
A fig drops somewhere.
The home too
slowly degenerates.
And to fabricate the plinth
of another abode
the boys have left.
In the forecourt
of the old dwelling place,
we root out the
obnoxious weeds.
The ripe leaves fall off
the tree
one after one.
(Translation by Jyotirmoy Talukdar)
MANKIND IS BASICALLY EARTH
Jonmoni Das
The Sea Do not restrain its waves
The River
Do not restrict its flow
The Earth
Keeps revolving round the Sun
The Sky Always remain the Sky
The bird sits in incubation
With a dream in its eyes
Mankind is basically Earth
Every person’s heart holds
An yearning for fertility
Happiness and sorrows of life
Is the mossy rocky surface
The light removes silently
The veil of darkness Every morning
(Translated by Bibekananda Choudhury)
FLYING SHADOW
Jonmoni Das
When the shadow grows shorter
The noon screams stands erect on its feet,
A bird cries and flies away sprinkling flying shadow...
I think about the dream
I have seen in the dream
And stopping by the rocky
Tell silence quietly many a words
Which I have never told any body.
(Translated by Prakash Bhuyan)
The Axle (Dhora)
Kishore Monjit Bora
A few days before
My father married my mother
Had brought a pair of wheel
at rupees twelve 'kudi'
He bought the axle
At seventeen 'kudi'
It was not an easy task
To spend so much hard earned money.
The cart ran
The cow path was shortened
Through the rice fields
In the bullock cary covered with a sail
Beautiful evenings came
Thirty-two years ago
Now I am twenty four years old.
The bullock cart is no more.
The pair of wheel exists.
The axle exists.
What is no more? Whst--
The carved bamboo
The myth of a pair of white and red bullocks
Olive coloured streets
The shadow of thatched hut
The attached long whistles of calmness
And--
The whistle of the river bank
The falling sun over the bamboos
A red sun
The restless reapers' mist covered stiff fingers
Have no light
The houses become concrete
The attachment of soul gone away
The axle torn away
The axle of the heart
Where the evening of tea
With a piece of joggery of Filobari
Has gone?
Where has the high flame of 'meji'
Has gone?
The axle has fallen apart, my son
Come,
Let's go home.
Note:
1. Kudi means Rs. 20/-.
2. Meji means a pile or column of split fire-wood or straw erected on the bank of a river or tank for burning on the early morning of the Magh Bihu.
(Translated from original Assamese(Dhora) by prof. Gitali Saikia )
Sun(Surya)
Kishore Monjit Bora
A clod of earth
Harappa's blood on earth
The dance of a peacock
Arrested in the marks of a gravel
Is cloud's youth
The sun how
Ancient it is
Yet eternally young
Perennially young women
The Sun is Harappa Mohenjodaro
The Sun is life-flavoured soil
The menstruating earth
In a brass pitcher
Engraving circles
The slender fingers of the Sun?
Translated by prof. Chandan Borgohain, Dept. of English, Sibsagar
College, Joysagar.
Incognito
Gautam Priyam Mahanta
"Miyan, aap toh shyar nikle!"
Slaughtering the last bit of innocence for the day's quota,
The butcher's knife in my hand was caught off guard.
And I denied being a poet, abusing my imaginary namesake who's defaming me.
The price of this oxygen mask of survival is thousand key depressions per minute.
Isn't then, poetry a costly luxury, a suffocation!
"Have you seen puppet play Janab? Are the puppets ever lauded?"
Losing our faces behind crude masks, our faded out faces that signfy nothing anymore.
A Tiananmen ban on our dust sprayed eyes, our frozen lips.
I took my cell-phone out of my pocket and switched it off in strategic defence.
Delaying the inevitable is a form of survival, arguably.
Love is a Mortal Word
Gautam Priyam Mahanta
II ONE II
Letting loose a butterfly from a fenced terrain, he runs
To catch the dry colours the barbed wire sought from its wings...
The colours vanish, in two wet eyes of hope.
Feeding grasses softer than butterfliese,
How the lawn gave the landmines his thirteen cows!
Comes the cowherd to watch faint green,
Seeds of grass that survived death.
Taping his bansuri in a muted present,
He wands his compensatory cattle to grow, faster.
|| TWO ||
Clad in blue sky, they shook my hand, and cheked.
Taking my pen for a sharpened knife,
They took it away, and showed me the way to you.
Devoid of words, I limped,
Vulnerable as ever, I limped forward.
You showed me your Suryavanshi lineage,
And hugged.
I wept in your father's lounge.
The night, when I vowed to parachute,
Withdrew the entire airbase from our hillock.
An empty railway platform greeted my bleeding feet miles away.
It was dawning, it blinded me.
SURYODOY AND SURUJMUKHI
Pratim Baruah
(1)
I went down to the plains
In the foothills
Every evening
Sat a mart
I returned to see
The camps in shambles
Congrealed blood-stairs spattered all over
(2)
Light prevail
Followed by darkness
Darkness
Then light again
Day night
Night day
Last year we missed the sound of rain
This year too
And next year too...
Days advanced to nights
Nights advanced to days
(3)
Water gushes in shattering the walls
Water rushes in eroding the plinths
Somewhere dearth of water wrests away lives
While somewhere water itself wrests away lives
(4)
Just s single blanket for winter
If one pulls it, the other shivers from cold
If the other pulls it...
The wintry mist seeps in
Through the chinks in the walls
(5)
Amid the congealed stains of blood
The wife of my friend
Slain by bullets last night
Deliver a pair of twins
Everyone together name them
Suryodoy and Surujmukhi
Suryodoy- Dawn
Surujmukhi- Sunflower
POEM
Pratim Baruah
(1)
Now winter shall descend
With dense fog
I'll keep first day of snow-fall
As I'd waited one day
For your first kiss
(2)
I sat to pen a pome
With you in mind
How do I begin!
Where do i end!
As I kept pondering
Two tear-drops fell
On the blank page
I understood
My love was true!
(3)
It was a Sunday
And as per regulation
The shops remained closed
It was evening time
I entered the market's interior
Through the alleys between the closed shops
And I beheld Binanda Uncle
Who had died some days before
Entering the market with a bag in hand
Limping on a walking-stick
(4)
In the middle of the right
The cry of the ailing infant
With begging hands
Waiting all day long on the pavement
Seem to come drifting in the wind
How many times drifting in the wind
How many times would I repeat
Love ought to be
Man's eternal religion
Translated to English by Krishna Dulal Baruah
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