Seven Poems of Pash
Translated from Punjabi
by Rajesh Kumar Sharma
1. Face to Face with the Present One Has Fought For
I am frightened of newspapers these days
frightened
that there must be in them
somewhere
the news
that nothing has happened
You perhaps do not know
- or maybe you do -
how terrifying it is when nothing happens
when your eyes wait with baited breath
and all lies passive
like a cold woman
Even the talk of people in the village assembly
seems like a serpent
holding in its paralyzing clutch
the tree
that would sway in freedom
I am afraid
this world which looks abandoned and incomplete
like an assembly of vacant chairs
must be thinking how ridiculous we are
What a shame
that even after centuries
bread, work and death should think
we live only for them
I do not know how I should explain
to shy mornings and rallying nights
and to gentle evenings
that we have not come here to be greeted with a salute
from them
and that there is nothing to embrace
between equals
when one stands at arm’s length
from arms outstretched for an embrace
Even accidents arrive nowadays
like panting old men
on whores’ staircases
Why isn’t there anything
these days
like the first meeting
with one’s first love?
This country
the creation of great souls
- how long, after all, will it escape
the horned fiend of death?
When, at last, shall we return
to our homes
that happen to be
like happenings –
we
the exiles from life’s humble noises?
When shall we, at last, sit
around the smoke from smoldering fires
and listen
to the proud fire’s tales?
One day
we shall surely kiss
the cheeks of seasons
All earth will then become
a newspaper
and it will carry the news
of so many happenings
one day
Translated April 2005
-----
2. Against the Language of Diplomacy
When I faltered
and fell at your feet
you became the Buddha
but I am still trying
to balance my wounded flight
I call from a withered orchard
far away from beyond Lake Mansarovar
I speak not to you
but to the soldier breathing his last
in the battlefield of Kalinga
Why is it
that knowledge is only the twist of a rope
around our necks?
Soldier, can you tell me
why the way to salvation lies
through your and my
last hiccups?
Do not the footprints
that have left for the Banyan at Gaya
know that time is aging in my eyes?
Into those footprints will converge
one day
Yashodhara’s
- but for me the Himalayas will extend interminably
moment after moment
Soldier, you have seen the country
expand and shrink this side and that
of rivers
but Lake Mansarovar
- which is like a deep far-off moonlit night -
never understood
why and how man became Dravidian sometimes
but at others Aryan
it never understood
why the verses of the Quran and the Vedas rose
like smoke
to choke the nostrils and eyes of men
and why the water from Mansarovar
never returned
to tell the tales of men dishonoured by knowledge
Soldier, Mansarovar would little know
why I, a drop of its vapours, did not return this time
from another merry wandering with friendly winds
Mansarovar is not an Abdali
nor did I bring, like Sabir, some threatening word
but let me tell you something -
wherever Shah Nawaz happens to be
a mere unsheathed bright silence becomes
for the sake of his speech
a word
but in my wings the nectar
oozing from the first-time mother’s tender breasts
has never changed into a shelter
of any one of the seven colours
And do you know, Soldier,
how impotence makes language a rascal
- which uses the word history for a wound
and civilization
for the pain of wounds untold?
It perhaps thinks all flying birds are swans
and pearls are merely peas, pulses or grains of rice
It knows just this much –
that Mansarovar engenders rivers for the sake of a folly called nation
it understands only this –
that the poetry of the Vedas and the Quran is just smoke
Mansarovar is, for it, a mere lake,
a dead quiet -
and the melting of embodied words
into sounds
by Harvallabh or Tansen or Ghulam Ali, music –
in the sound of death’s footsteps
it finds the song of swans
Soldier, it sounds, of course, awkward
to describe a dying man as one
who belongs to the race of swans
But all this is the mischief of language
- that poetry should be reduced
to mere smoke
and man, blinded and sneezing,
should submit to regimented obedience
and offer his chest – annoyed with his beating heart -
to the devil
for medals of valour
and that the devil should plant in his chest
nails of gold
and teach him the ways to turn gold
into grains
and food into vodka
and that vodka change man
into a jackal, a fox, and then a wolf
- and the pack of wolves
into society
Soldier, how can the swan say
that Tolstoy arrived too late
and that the real story had begun way before the day
the ploughman’s bread was stolen . . .
O Soldier, if you agree to rise
we shall leave this rascally language to die
in the battlefield of Kalinga
and proceed for the Siddhartha of Kapilavastu
on the way
we shall also meet Shankaracharya
before giving all knowledge back
to the East India Company
Later you can go and live
on any piece of the naked earth
- without telling the sea
that real history is the other one
My messages
the rivers from Mansarovar will carry
messages that shall be
like gypsy songs
or like the pollen of divinity
dropping sweetly from wanderer eyes
messages that shall have
the mystery of mountain springs
If you could just arise, O Soldier!
if you could only arise . . . .
Translated April 2005
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3. I Ask
I ask the Sun
flying across the sky –
Is this what they call time?
That events should trample
like crazy elephants
over all human consciousness?
That each question should be
no more than an error
of absorption in thought?
Why are we retold the same old joke
every time?
Why do they say
we live?
Think for a moment –
How many here have anything to do
with the thing called life?
What kind of God’s mercy is that
which falls alike on hands cracked
and bleeding
from weeding a field of wheat
and on the pulpy bodies
stretched on divans in a marketplace?
Why is it
that a loud-crying silence lies frozen
on faces besieged
by the noise of ox bells and of engines drawing water?
Who is it
that devours the fried fish of biceps
of dreams chopped
with swaths on fodder-choppers?
Why does the peasant in my village
beg for mercy
from a mere police constable?
Why is it
that every time someone being crushed
shrieks
the cry is disposed of as a poem?
I ask the Sun
that flies across the sky
Translated April 2005
---
4. My Nightingale!
Time is a bloody dog, my nightingale!
Come, leave the orchards
and watch the souls wandering homeless
on streets
Bark or howl
in mourning
for your song will cure no one now
Wasn’t this the song that sat like dew on twigs
but fled
terrified like vapours
before a mere flake
of sunlight?
Time is a bloody dog, my nightingale!
It has nibbled away
the hands of clocks
it has bitten off walls
and pissed on flowerpots
Don’t know
what else it would’ve done
hadn’t the government’s men put it on leash
and tied it
outside their bungalows
My nightingale!
My doings are of a different kind
I have lost every wager that looked
like life
I now wish to be horse
not man
For the saddle is too painful
on human bones
the spiky bridle hurts
and my human feet do not keep
the beat of a poem
Time is a bloody dog,
my nightingale!
Translated April 2005
-----
5. Dreams
Not everyone dreams
The fire that sleeps
in grains of lifeless gunpowder
does not dream
Dreams grow
in hearts of courage
They spring
when sleep is merciful
Everyone
that is why
dreams
Translated April 2005
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6. Untitled
Deep inside me
the clouds thunder
I fear for you
lest you be blown away
with the innocence
of nests
I live in a world of savages
who do not know
what lightning can do
Translated April 2005
-----
7. Words Dishonoured
You have
purposely
dishonoured words.
If they have lost their way
who else can you blame?
These trees want me to answer
what they should call the Sun
that neither burns
nor turns red.
I look towards the trees,
count the colours of wind,
and size up the seasons.
And I cannot say
the Sun is not guilty.
For the sake of the Sun
I make rude words sit
in Swayamvara.
You would think
I have flung myself
into a chasm
from some high peak.
The truth is I have changed the meaning
of chasms,
I have taken the wind
for a swing,
have made use of mountains
for a leap beyond.
I have changed
for you
what suicide means.
Comrade, life shall mean something else to you.
Even if, before dying,
you finally understood life,
who would trust you?
Who would forgive you?
You
who purposely violated
the innocence of meaning.
Translated April 2005
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Translated by
Rajesh Kumar Sharma
Department of English
Punjabi University, Patiala – 147002
Email: sharajesh@gmail.com
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