ORIYA POETRY

RAMAKANTA RATH

 

        LINES ADDRESSED TO HER NON-RESIDENT PRESENCE

         I had thought
         I had forgotten you entirely.

         And then, one day, I quarrelled
         with everyone—with wife, children,
         with Government and God.
         Before the quarrel ended, I walked away,
         and stood near the window.
         Outside the window
         A moonlit fog extended
         till the world's end.

         You were there, draped in
         Clothes made of the trees and the shurbs
         on the river's banks.
         A smile glimmered
         on you melancholy skin.
         In your eyes there was
         a rain-wet paddy field that never ended.
         Your uncombed hair fluttered in the wind
         like leaves of sugarcane.
         Your mouth, half-open and half-shut,
         stood where all dialogue terminates.
         Your legs rose from the dark depths of dreams.
         Your body shook, and every single letter of your name
         was written in the indelible ink of time past.

         I knew you would leave soon.
         How could you stay
         Unless the time for staying came?
         Wherever you go, a hand raised above shoulders
         can touch the stars.
         The steamer arrives every morning
         to say good morning to women
         who hold entire rivers in their eyes.
         The earth and the outer space are one.
         The eyes of eyes and the ears of ears
         walk about in shaded coconut groves,
         and gods and goddesses stand at your doorsteps
         yearning for morsels of benediction
         flowing from your meditation on yourself.

         After your leave, what remains?
         bare rocks, the moonlight's darkness
         erasing all future,
         several blood-stained years, dead soldiers
         guarding unused gunpower on the sea-bed,
         and the desolate road I must walk on
         till the last day of my life.

         Go, then, with so few days left to me,
         a change in my condition can no longer be
         the subject-matter of hope.
         I now have fever almost everyday,
         nerves from the waist to the heels ache,
         and, if I rise up without proper precaution,
         I feel I am descending into some bottomless depth.
         The skin is loose and dry, the weight
         has fallen, maybe someday now
         my breath will stop somewhere inside the lungs.
         I would have notified all this to you,
         but then, didn't you and I discover long ago
         that news of this kind was utterly useless
         both for you and for me?
 
 

               THE SOLDIER IN EXILE
 

                Sometimes I wish I should return,
                throw this body to the ground before the judges
                installed in all the marketplaces of my country,
                and tell them, come, hang it
                on your gallows of prefabricated words.

                Sometimes I wish I should stop hiding among rocks,
                and feeding on the sunlight and on the wind,
                sail across the ocean's nights and days.
                I would then unload all my bones
                into the arms of the soil smiling at my homecoming
                and tell it I have no further part
                in its future.

                I however hesitate.
                The shores of my country would be inaccessible
                with stones dislodged by vengeance and counter-vengeance
                and with putrid weeds of mangled interpretations,
                all its green and proud forests would have been burnt
                by loud proclamations of conquests that never occurred,
                its body bleeding,
                its railways and roadways and harbours shattered,
                enacampments of imported mercenaries
                all along the banks of its moist eyes.

                All this notwithstanding,
                I sometimes wish I should return,
                but some other times I do not wish I should return.
                Sometimes it seems all my love is a moon
                rising every evening and setting every dawn
                in the sky above wherever I exist.

 
        Sometimes, however, I wish I should return.
 

       Translation :
          The Poet
 

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