Selected Poems

Earth, clamped into rock or flitting into the clouds;

  Rapt in meditation in the silence of a ring of mountains

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  Or noisy with the roar of sleepless sea-waves;

  You are beauty and abundance, terror and famine.

  On the one hand, acres of crops, bent with ripeness,

  Brushed free of dew each morning by delicate sunbeams –

  With sunset, too, sending through their rippling greenness

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  Joy, joy;

  On the other, in your dry, barren, sickly deserts

  The dance of ghosts amid strewn animal-bones.

  I have watched your Baiśākh-storms swoop like black hawks

  Ripping the horizon with lightning-beaks:

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  The whole sky roars like a rampant lion,

  Lashing tail whipping up trees

  Till they crash to the ground in despair;

  Thatched roofs break loose,

  Race before the wind like convicts from their chains.

  70

  But I have known, in Phālgun, the warm south breeze

  Spread all the rhapsodies and soliloquies of love

  In its scent of mango-blossom;

  Seen the foaming wine of heaven overflow from the moon’s goblet;

  Heard coppices suddenly submit to wind’s importunity

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  And burst into breathless rustling.

  You are gentle and fierce, ancient and renewing;

  You emerged from the sacrificial fire of primal creation

  Immeasurably long ago.

  Your cyclic pilgrimage is littered with meaningless remnants of history;

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  You abandon your creations without regret; strew them layer upon layer,

  Forgotten.

  Guardian of Life, you nurture us

  In little cages of fragmented time,

  Boundaries to all our games, limits to all renown.

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  Today I stand before you without illusion:

  I do not ask at your door for immortality

  For the many days and nights I have spent weaving you garlands.

  But if I have given true value

  To my small seat in a tiny segment of one of the eras

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  That open and close like blinks in the millions of years

  Of your solar round;

  If I have won from the trials of life a scrap of success;

  Then mark my brow with a sign made from your clay -

  To be rubbed out in time by the night

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  In which all signs fade into the final unknown.

  O aloof, ruthless Earth,

  Before I am utterly forgotten

  Let me place my homage at your feet.

  Africa

  When, in that turbid first age,

  The Creator, displeased with himself,

  Destroyed his new creations again and again;

  In those days of his shaking and shaking his head in irritation

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  The angry sea

  Snatched you from the breast of Mother Asia,

  Africa –

  Consigned you to the guard of immense trees,

  To a fastness dimly lit.

  10

  There in your hidden leisure

  You collected impenetrable secrets,

  Learnt the arcane languages of water and earth and sky;

  Nature’s invisible magic

  Worked spells in your unconscious mind.

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  You ridiculed Horror

  By making your own appearance hideous;

  You cowed Fear

  By heightening your menacing grandeur,

  By dancing to the drumbeats of chaos.

  20

  Alas, shadowy Africa,

  Under your black veil

  Your human aspect remained unknown,

  Blurred by the murk of contempt.

  Others came with iron manacles,

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  With clutches sharper than the claws of your own wild wolves:

  Slavers came,

  With an arrogance more benighted than your own dark jungles.

  Civilization’s barbarous greed

  Flaunted its naked inhumanity.

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  You wailed wordlessly, muddied the soil of your steamy jungles

  With blood and tears;

  The hobnailed boots of your violators

  Stuck gouts of that stinking mud

  Forever on your stained history.

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  Meanwhile across the sea in their native parishes

  Temple-bells summoned your conquerors to prayer,

  Morning and evening, in the name of a loving god.

  Mothers dandled babies in their laps;

  Poets raised hymns to beauty.

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  Today as the air of the West thickens,

  Constricted by imminent evening storm;

  As animals emerge from secret lairs

  And proclaim by their ominous howls the closing of the day;

  Come, poet of the end of the age,

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  Stand in the dying light of advancing nightfall

  At the door of despoiled Africa

  And say, ‘Forgive, forgive – ’

  In the midst of murderous insanity,

  May these be your civilization’s last, virtuous words.

  1937–1941

  The Borderland - 9

  I saw, in the twilight of flagging consciousness,

  My body floating down an ink-black stream

  With its mass of feelings, with its varied emotion,

  With its many-coloured life-long store of memories,

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  With its flutesong. And as it drifted on and on

  Its outlines dimmed; and among familiar tree-shaded

  Villages on the banks, the sounds of evening

  Worship grew faint, doors were closed, lamps

  Were covered, boats were moored to the ghāts. Crossings

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  From either side of the stream stopped; night thickened;

  From the forest-branches fading birdsong offered

  Self-sacrifice to a huge silence.

  Dark formlessness settled over all diversity

  Of land and water. As shadow, as particles, my body

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  Fused with endless night. I came to rest

  At the altar of the stars. Alone, amazed, I stared

  Upwards with hands clasped and said: ‘Sun, you have removed

  Your rays: show now your loveliest, kindliest form

  That I may see the Person who dwells in me as in you.’

  The Borderland – 10

  King of Death, your fatal messenger came to me

  Suddenly from your durbar. He took me to your vast courtyard.

  My eyes saw darkness; I did not see the invisible light

  In the depths and layers of your darkness, the light

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  That is the source of the universe; my vision

  Was clouded by my own darkness. That a great hymn

  To light should swell from the inmost cavern of my being

  And reach to the realm of light at the edge of creation –

  That was why you sent for me. I sang,

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  Aiming in my melody to bring to the theatre of physical

  Existence the poetic glory of the spirit.

  But my vīnā could not play the music of destruction,

  Could not compose a rāga of silent wrath;

  My heart could not engender a serene image of the terrible.

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  And so you sent me back. The day will come

  When my poetry, silently falling like a ripened fruit

  From the weight of its fullness of joy,

  Shall be offered up to eternity. And then at last

  I shall pay you in full, finish my journey, meet your call.

>   Leaving Home

  One in the morning - waking in a flurry,

  Fresh sleep ruptured. The clock by his pillow

  Had roused him brusquely with its harsh alarm.

  His time in the house was finished.

  5

  Now, in the cold of Aghrān,

  At the call of merciless duty,

  He must leave family, go to an alien land.

  All that was discardable for now

  Would remain behind:

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  The rickety divan with its grimy bedspread;

  The broken-armed easy-chair;

  In the bedroom,

  Balanced on a leaning tepoy

  A spattered old mirror;

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  In a corner, a wooden cupboard

  Stuffed with worm-eaten ledger-books;

  Stacked against the walls,

  Piles of outdated almanacs.

  In a niche, a tray of withered, abandoned pūjā-flowers:

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  All of this there in the feeble lamplight,

  Wrapped in shadow, motionless, meaningless.

  The taxi brashly honked its presence at the door.

  The deeply sleeping town

  Stayed aloof.

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  The distant police-station-bell rang three-and-a-half.

  Gazing up at the sky,

  Sighing deeply,

  He invoked divine protection for his long journey.

  Then he padlocked the door of his house.

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  Dragging his unwilling body,

  He moved forward, paused –

  Above him, bats’ wings

  Swept across the black emptiness of the sky

  Like shadowy spectres of the cruel fate

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  That was leading his life into uncertainty.

  By the temple, the aged banyan-tree

  Had been swallowed by the night as by a snake.

  By the bank round the newly-dug tank

  Where labourers’ dwellings had sprung up

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  Roofed with date-palm leaves, faint lights flickered.

  Near them, the scattered bricks of a tumbledown kiln.

  Images of life, outlines blurred

  By the ink-wash of night –

  Farmers busy all day in the fields cutting paddy;

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  Girls gossiping, arms round each other’s necks;

  Boys, released from school,

  Scampering raucously;

  A sack-laden ox cajoled and shoved to morning market;

  Herd-boys floating across to fields on the other side of the river

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  By clinging to the necks of buffalo –

  The ever-familiar play of life as the taxi rushed the traveller

  Through the dark, but before its dawn arousal.

  As he sped past a weed-filled pond

  The scent of its water

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  Evoked the cool, tender embrace of many days and nights.

  But on went the car by the winding route

  To the station:

  Rows of houses on either side –

  People inside them comfortably sleeping.

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  Through gaps between the trees in the dark mango-groves

  The morning-star could be glimpsed,

  Honouring the brow of silence

  With the mark of infinity.

  On the traveller went,

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  Alone among sleeping thousands,

  While the car that hastened him echoed far and wide

  Down the empty streets,

  Callous in its sound.

  In the Eyes of a Peacock

  The terrace where I sit is screened

  From the springtime dawn sunshine.

  What a boon to have leisure –

  No pressing tasks crowding in upon me yet;

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  No hordes of people pestering me,

  Trampling over my time.

  I sit and write:

  The sweetness of a free morning collects in my pen-nib

  Like the juice that drips from a slit in a date-palm.

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  Our peacock has come to sit on the railing next to me,

  Tail spread downwards.

  He finds safe refuge with me –

  No unkind keeper comes to him here with shackles.

  Outside, unripe mangoes dangle from branches;

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  Lemon trees are loaded with lemons;

  A single kurci-tree seems surprised

  By its excess of flowers.

  The peacock bends his head to this side and that

  With unthinking natural restlessness.

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  His detached stare

  Pays not the slightest attention to the marks in my note-book.

  If the letters were insects he would look:

  He would not then regard a poet as utterly useless.

  I smile at the peacock’s solemn indifference,

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  Observe my writing through his eyes;

  And indeed the same aloofness

  Is in the entire blue sky,

  In every leaf of the tree that is hung with green mangoes,

  In the buzzing of the wild bee-hive in our tamarind-tree.

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  I reflect that in ancient Mohenjodaro,

  On a similarly idle late Caitra morning,

  A poet must have written poems,

  And universal nature took no account whatsoever.

  The peacock is still to be found in the balance-sheet of life,

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  And green mangoes still hang from branches;

  Their value in the gamut of nature from blue sky to green woods

  Will not diminish at all.

  But the poet of Mohenjodaro is completely excluded

  From the wayside grass, from the dark night’s fireflies.

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  I expand my consciousness

  Into endless time and vast earth;

  I absorb the huge detachment of nature’s own meditations

  Into my own mind;

  I regard the letters in my note-book

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  As autumnal flocks of insects –

  I conclude that if I were to tear out the pages today

  I would merely be advancing the ultimate cremation awaiting them anyway.

  Suddenly I hear a voice –

  ‘Grandfather, are you writing?’

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  Someone else has come – not a peacock this time

  But Sunayanī, as she is called in the house,

  But whom I call Śunāyanī because she listens so well.

  She has the right to hear my poems before anyone else.

  I reply, ‘This won’t appeal to your sensitive ears:

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  It’s vers libre.’

  A wave of furrows plays across her forehead -

  ‘I’ll put up with it,’ she says,

  Then adds a little flattery: