Saturday, April 4, 2020

In the Womb of the Eastern River (A translation)


সূর্যমুখী নদীৰ কোলাত । অবনী চক্রবর্তী 

Even in the song of the creek he hears cacophony of sirens
(And they say the poet lives in the silence of solitude).
He hears the squeal of fallen leaves;
Powerful eyesight of silence!

The darkness calculates
The gruesome pain of the machine-led night;
Bewildered at the parasitic creeper crawling up
The arms of the lush cassia.

He gages at the leftover terracotta dreams
In the womb of the rock that still shines
In the darkness of the night.

And in the cradle of the eastern river:
A motel is birthed.
A new sunrise of horizontal beams
In the dog collared pages of an old book.

Down below he hears the melody of the raging people
He dives in; shifting sand and pebbles, picks up the octave
A broken sky
Belonging to the artist who has never seen the lantern
Perhaps a motel built in the grave of a civilization
Dropping dead, breaking the pathway of a friend
Blinded in the lust of development
She sleeps into the darkness of the cemetery.

Every ghastly night he falls in love with solitude.

Sawing to death all morbid memories.  


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