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Modern Poems O GODDESS, VENDOR
OF O goddess, vendor of liberty! Bind me not in thy boundlessness; And in the unending path of destiny Happy be thy unmoving voyage. Goddess, veiling the Love Eternal, Come to our mortal land, here bring Heaven's nectar, To this transient pilgrim life; O Guide eternal! draw the pause of our tiresomeness. O Mind of magic! A stirless stream art thou upon our stilled earth, As though the sweet enchanted ocean engulfing a golden boat – O I kiss the Twin Hearts! THE VIGIL (A Surrealistic Poem) Twigs and straws, broken bits, strewn about in a lumber room – all nettles' teeth. Shadows, somewhat old and familiar, humming low make a merry band. If you have the trump card to flick down, the whole game would turn right about: In the blue hibiscus bush of adolescence – Io, the dumbfounded Sesame!
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166 THE NET IS CAST The net is cast and the pool is a drunken swell and swirl: Shrunken blackened petals are afloat, Oh, the children that came down under a curse: Fortunate are they who remember past lives; here it
is a If this were all the shelter, the other shelter would be nowhere. No more time to lose – whose is the refrain coming back again and again? Whose the image looking straight into your eyes level to level – since when? Under the rotting weeds they go down into the depths one by one Flowerets that grandmother wove into a pattern, as though with
the lightest strokes of a brush!
RUHIRA SHYAM BARITONE Let us all move together, one and all, Together into the cavern of the ribs, Raise there a song of discordant sounds – Red and blue and white, kin or alien. Listen, the groan plays on: Dreams as if possessed Swing, like bats on branches; Is now the time for dance? Come, let us all move together, one and all. Let the streams meet in the body, one and all; Yea, let the bones brighten up still more,
Page – 167 Let us all go around the fire And scrape and eat of the very liver of the Muse. . . Let
us go, let us go, let us go one and all. TO THE MOTHER Hold me so to Thy breast, O Mother, Let aeon after aeon pass, I'd on Thy bosom, Mother, Rest my head for e'er. Closed are all my concerns with life, Closed are all my dealings with the world, Renounced are all my desires, For the celestial sweetness of Thy Love. Not for me the royal seat, Not for me ruby and robe, Nothing, nothing but Thy touch alone Can fill the thirst of my soul. Immersed Thou art in bliss, In the boundless bliss of Thy infinite consciousness, Hold me, bind me, 0 Mother, To Thy breast of eternal ecstasy. DAYS. . . NIGHTS. .
. AGES Days. . . Nights. . . Ages. . . A shattered mind without solace. Words. . . tunes. . . rhythms. What else
but sighs of misery.
Page – 168 Eyes unwinking and tearful Close at the lashing even of a frown; Vain lament weeps its winding ways Only to mock at me. And yet desires cry out in despair And hopes rise in life's bosom. . . The path ahead lies through dust and gale. I hear afar the breathings of a high flood. I long for the song of freedom, But helpless the mind is bound in its own webs And I follow the tortuous path in front Through nights. . . ages. LABANYA PALIT IN THY NAME In Thy name the eyes are still dim with tears And the heavens tremulous with the song of birds. In Thy name a world of flowers is still in bloom And on memory's waters spread grey yearnings and illusions. In Thy name Love lingers still in the bosom And the wounded heart weeps and laughs in silence. In Thy name a blue spell still dwells upon life And eyes in their depths
enshrine a mournful dark shadow.
PARIMAL CHAKRABARTY
Page – 169 YESTERNIGHT There passed a storm last night: A whole forest of trees that grew lush in my mind Now stand shorn of their leaves Like rows of skeletons. Last night a cruel, ruthless storm Passed by. Yet in its very wake, A crescent moon, Like a necklet Rose in a corner of the sky. I gazed at it And the memory of the storm vanished: The withered forest of the mind Bathed in a wondrous light. The crescent moon, like a necklet . . . Was it your mouth, was it your eye? O my far one!
RAMAKRISHNA PRASAD
CHATTOPADHYAYA A FIRE-FLY IS THIS
MIND A fire-fly is this mind, Now it flares, now it fades; It must cross the darkness, So runs about here and there. As if a needle of light I t pierces the mighty curtain: On an edge of the inner being It
weaves a fringe of glimmering consciousness.
Page – 170 Even like a lightning flash In this small bit of my sky That too gleams Off and on. A fire-fly is this mind And I know it will never receive an answer: Around lies a blind Night, dark, impenetrable Ever dumb. Within there as if the spark of a question This fire-fly of the mind With no reason blooms and withers. It vainly believes that all existence hangs on it As a flower on its stem. And yet There is a secret rumour in the darkness As creation rows along dashing and splashing. To that measure does this fire-fly of the mind Glimmer – flare and fade Seeking an ascension elsewhere Beyond knowing and unknowing.
PREMENDRA MITRA ON LOSING Have you ever lost your way Mar from marts and paths and cities in an endless meadow Where with a
lone simool The sky passes its life-long day? There after a long search for a road The earth lies down, eyes closed, Heart reposed, The lone simool at
her head standing silent.
Page – 171 Tired in the search for a road Some chance one day to arrive at the meadow, Amazed they look About and above. There where no road exists Just a trail appears of a new hope, Where all other ways are lost One seems to find one's own. One day, why not, go out and lose your way, leave your familiar city for the unknown meadow, There where a lone simool and the sky Stand and look into each other's eyes.
PREMENDRA MITRA INTO THE BOAT Trampling my own shadow on a long, long path I came And saw a river of gladness. I pushed the bank with my left foot And with the right landed into the boat. Here a straw canopy over the head, A wooden floor to sit upon, A helm sure and certain, an oar within reach And a sail to unfurl in the sky, – All were there: A whole lung-full of breath turned into a flight of pigeons that
found the sky.
PURNENDUPRASAD
BHATTACHARYA
Page – 172 TREMBLINGLY I WAIT I know not when you may arrive From behind the light: The waves may break upon the door And I shall stretch out my hands In a tremor. I have lived ages in the embrace of the shade: Now I do not see the earth's sun I have made a home of the shade: I have not seen myself Mirrored nor in the light, nor in the air Nor in the water. Tremblingly I wait: I know not when you may arrive From behind the screen of light, Out of my sight, in the pattern of cruel falsehood I have been used And for ages I know not myself. Tremblingly I await: I know not when you may arrive Just from behind my own self! TIMELESS Time and Space endless, seamless the grey ocean, Then aeons of trance broke into a voiceful play of tossing waves And last an insentient earth now holds in her womb the seed of consciousness. We who have seen a red lotus blazing ceaselessly And a white lotus ever winkless upon the earth. . . Do we yet
understand? Can we assess the value?
Page – 173 Even today the earth is sundered and man goes hungry and tortured, Blood burns in pain, life lives barren in the veins; And still, O Lord, thou hast sent thy messengers time and again Who brought with them the legacy of the starry lights. . . Another hunger, another untamed pain now Has awakened a sudden mighty restlessness in the roots of the being! It is Night's low tide: in the dark we tug the boat on . . . Sinews we have none, when shall we fly our wings, when shall the consciousness
dawn? NIGHT COMES BACK Night comes back again and again, and yet It goes back again and again, and The morning sky rings with the quiet and tranquil music of Light. Sorrow comes back again and again, and yet It goes back again and again, and Life swells with the
billowing Death comes back again and again, and yet It goes back again and again, and Man's deathless world
sings the hymn of Birth.
NIRENDRA
LAL CHAKRAVARTI
Page – 174 CLOUDS, EVENING AND
I Clouds, evening and I stand under the sky. It appears Daylight is an illusion And darkness is real: And I have gone back again into the womb and effaced the scars of time. Time here is timelessness. When you are in its embrace there is no death nor birth, You are just a grey notch upon the sky – Ended the
earth's business, vanished the crowd.
SANJOY
BHATTACHARYA MY MIND MUST HAVE YEARNED My mind must have yearned for some purest white: That is why one day the sunbright embrace of hills and clouds left me enchanted – And I find another light in the light of my eyes. This is also the whiteness of the soul in its vastness: It illumines smoothly the thickened darkness among the stars; Its silence descends like moonbeams The whole business of life seems to possess that alone; and in the dark cave of the heart it is that I seek, I seek.
SANJOY BHATTACHARYA
Page – 175 THE SHADOW OF THE
HARBOUR A dismal shadow upon the harbour, A broad day in swoon. . . But you are restive, my beauty! my love! Wipe then the red mark on your memory, forget the words of promise. . . The bank heaves with the rising tide. . . all's ready for the drift! Boats and masts and sails and the bustle and hubbub. . . And your secret desire and the boundless swell of waters. I too cast my blood's yearning into the streaming flow. . . My destiny, the gloomy shadow upon the harbour.
SUNIL KUMAR NANDI BEYOND SOUND AND
LIGHT Oh, wipe out all the light of the sky, The whole world of the sun must never be seen Anywhere. Kindle the flame of the eye that is turned Inward – The darkness in the heart – and see If it does not grow yet more dark. And then, the sounds surging mountain-high, Let them, even like a landslide, hurtle down, One and all of these shouting particles Under the shelter of Night's solitude: Seal up your ears, listen to the stillness Within the heart, listen If it is yet more still...
Page – 176 Silence evermore, solitude evermore, Darkness evermore – In my heart shines the light of countless suns And
I shall know if you are there!
DEBIPRASAD MAITRA A BIT OF LIGHT A bit of light within my soul, But more perhaps is there of darkness. Darkness hides in secret In the fathomless depths. A streak from some Dawn Shall touch one day this soul And this soul shall rise Out of the Darkness And in its body of a flooding fountain Shall achieve a full-throated cadence. So shall the Secret be relumed. My love in the core of my heart I have borne everywhere around. You will see every breath Has left there its imprint – Oh, you will see there a child Pure and innocent And you will long to clasp it Within your bosom.
SANJAYA
BHATTACHARYA
Page – 177 WATER LOTUS Oh, the deep, the unerring aim: In a moment you did it, Ocean. And you knew not even the gift you made. . . In barren June you brought down the whole monsoon. Jewels and pearls, emeralds and sapphires, Summer and autumn, rain and spring, Dreams and desires and gains, all All are faint images of inanity. Towers and arches, columns and corridors Crumble down, huge abysses fade out: Decline or fall effaced in a moment. Alone survives the heaving flatness, The humid heart seeps with its dripping liquid, It melts in an ardent embrace, in an unerring gesture! Into your waters, this water is poured out, offering all unto the last, O, the Deep, the Vast, receive within you This lotus,
flower of the water!
NABENDRA CHAKRABARTY SOBS SWAY NATURE... Sobs sway Nature. . . whose are the sobs? In the sky even beyond Sight: drops of pain. . . whose are these? The blue is mute. . . aeons pass. . . a frozen stillness. . . Even now here am I, an illusory proxy bird. . . I write poems picking up the twinkles of stars as they scatter their hues and shed their petals, In this dwindling glow of footlights. . . The shadows sway timidly,
Page – 178 The darkness stretches hesitant her arms, Thoughts are a-cold in doubt and fear, The dense silence of a dark age spreading mist and haze, A sky of hard concrete. Termless concepts piled somewhere beyond ken Pain drips in the blue mute and mystic. . . Ages past bring down their primal stillness, The stars make an illegible script on heaven's glowing slate. . . Who has scribbled this poem unutterable and undecipherable, Who has written down these unending ideas, Who has painted this image of the mind, beyond understanding, An epistle of things secret... a throbbing heart... Stars sleepless. A sob sways Nature. . . the whole night Someone is in pain, a
muffled and repressed pain.
RABINDRA NATH STILL I WADE
THROUGH His name is written on the wings of sunlight, His thought lies a harvest field of autumn. . . And under the sky of the ending day Often do I lay down my head with eyes shadow-bedimmed. I glide into the sun-flooded waters And I look for a shade – No shore anywhere, I trudge on foot upon dusty roads – Oh, these roads of our earth. Shall I find it at last shall I? In the sun, in the fields, at the end of the day?
Page – 179 Still I wade through billowing waters – the
unmoving goal in front.
BASABI DUTT A I CAN LEAVE
EVERYTHING I can leave everything, but not the tree; May it remain, Straight and simple, may the tree remain in my life, May it remain, remain ever wakeful. I can leave everything, but not the river; May it remain, By the side of the tree, may it remain in my life, May it remain, remain ever wakeful. I can leave everything, but not the boat; May it remain, May the boat remain upon the river, remain in my life, May it remain ever wakeful. All I can give up, not you, O my pole-star! You must remain – Tree and river and boat, when all are swept away in the black darkness, Even then,
do remain transfixed in the night sky.
Page – 180 THE CENTRE OF THE
BODY The centre of this body is a sun with its seven-winged flames. Burn the strings of the body – the fire is pitiless, he does not know, if it is soft or hard, high or Iowa scale. He dissolves in the fiery heat the thin cord that links me to the earth. In the heavens of your heart I am a flying light, a flame bird. The pair of wings is loosened by the heat – The body drunk with the black smoke of gold is sunk in a swoon Both lie out-stretched, the front veering upward. The wandering stars in the spaces are in flight, in flight – out of sight. The sun has absconded, the moon a handful of ashes. Draining life to a pale emptiness, a bunch of roses blooms in the crimson garden of the veins, The pupil of the eye is torn out, the tired eye-lashes droop down stilled. Time trembles with the rise and fall of the breast. Life with its wings of fire is a soaring light: Your heavens are a cloudless beauty – Love and affection, memory and happiness Are now a cascade of gold-dust, as though drifting autumn leaves.
UMA DEVl RAINS COME DOWN Rains come down in a sudden burst, Overcasting all the ego-skies, The destitute traveller turns to penance and solitude: Yesteryear's
accounts are settled and closed.
Page – 181 Tearing open the heart's poignant secrecy. Chunks of darkness crash down, The eye shades within it a splashing stream, Footprints leave their echoes behind. A long night stops stilled in pain, Hard it is to forget even if one wishes to; It lashes and breaks upon the inner soul – The promise of a
SISIR BHATTACHARYA ONE BY ONE I CATCH THE STARS One by one I catch the stars And I bring them to touch my body one by one: They all turn into birds and flyaway. The stars glow like fire-flies They come and settle all over my body: Indeed my body is made of countless stars. At long last I have found out: I exist no longer, Filled with stars, am myself a Star. Take away the stars and I am no longer in the body, I leave my star-filled body And go up into the star-filled sky. Now I am a heavenly star Hence I shall become a starry heaven.
JAGADISH CHANDRA DAS
Page – 182 I AM A SWEET
FONDLING I am a sweet fondling of the Sky, I condescended to come down upon earth. Whoever makes a link with me Creates a link with the sky. I am a human from the sky treading upon this mud, At every step my anklets ring through earth's bosom. Upon the soft breast of earth I draw the very image of the sky. With my tinkling anklets on I walk through the bosom of the earth. This earth
is a stage for me, I play there a celestial drama – a true and real drama!
JAGADISH CHANDRA DAS
Page – 183
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