The Zahir I Met in Love and Delusion

 

It was such a lovely

Monsoon morn,

Fervently poised to pen

My long awaited poem

On love and its delusion,

After such a long hiatus

In a dew drenched sojourn;

But intuition intertwined

With a pair of eyes

Slashed through my

Bleeding heart

Like every other dawn:

All the withered words

In the clouded vision,

Left my empty manuscript

Looking so helplessly forlorn,

With all my self-drawn delusion,

With the severed wings

Of all my flustering imagination-

My zahir played a part though,

Like in a desert,

With the mirage of an ocean.      

 

I left my manuscript too,

Taking resort to the prosaic wanderings along the chameleon clouds over the ridges of a mountain, feeling the droplets of rains passing through my unwinged imagination; but the shrouds never drizzled down. The dawns kept coming on and on… And then I came across a night with a moon…

 

It was such a lovely

Blooming moon,

Weaving beauties

With the wild blue petals

Along a lonely

Secluded lawn;

Echoing couplets

Of a melancholic epic

Floating around

In the ashen blue sky

Of my raining heart.

But, they were all gone,

All on a sudden,

Like a spectrum

In a mid-summer illusion:

Swept away

By a November wind

From the north end.

 

And I knew it’s time to head for the North, for the nomadic way in search of my zahir that I met once in a godforsaken island in one of my dreams; or may be in a devil-may-care inter-section with a parallel dimension. And it’s where the Meghbalika I chanced to have painted got stuck into my wayward imagination. A pilgrimatic expedition is all I need to stop my soul erosion or to find myself back again in the downtown, may be by saying aloud all my untold stories, giving way to the new ones to be sewn. But, the zahir I lost my poem in is my love with all its delusion:

 

Oh Sir, she smiled sometimes

For whatsoever reason

To stir up the whole Pacific Ocean;

Which had nothing to do with me-

But my heart somehow reached

At the centre of the whirlpool

With the fins of my befooling imagination. 

 

Then there was the kind of look:

Could have easily pierced through

The heart of any bohemian fellow

Like the arrows of Apollo;

Which I thought to be meant for mine-

Which I thought to be from Cupid

With a suddenly discovered passion.

 

And sometimes those fireballs from the eyes:

I could easily interpret them to be

The outburst of emotion;

But, never could I imagine

The feelings I dreamt to be reciprocal

Were just the reflection

Mirrored by my own obsession.

 

But I can feel the rain and feel her

Like the flow of a monsoon;

I can keep walking in the drizzling

With a cup of coffee

And some freshly woven dreams,

And I feel her walking by me

Like the flow of a flaming infatuation:

 

That’s how the zahir and the Esther

Keep coming in together;

And I know both the delusion

And the zahir have to disappear

For the love to paint even deeper;

For an unfinished poem to reach a harbour;

For all the blissful pains to savour. 

But the love with all its delusion

Just want to glide on with the lotus-eaters;      

With the zahir and its obsession…

But, it’s time for the nomadic way,

It’s time to rend, and it’s time to sew:

Winters are long, and Ithaca is still far away…

 

© Atique R.

*The poem is inspired by the Paulo Coelho novel, The Zahir.

I Came to This World with an Endless Leisure

 

I was born with all the time of the world-

I’m one such a happy-go-lucky poet;

I’ve bathed my body in the sea,

All alone in the darkness;

I’ve loved the colored sunlight,

I’ve wandered around the weary autumn field,

In the laps of green like a grasshopper.

I’ve seen a teenage girl plucking yellow rhododendron:

Her red wet dress draping her chest,

Echoing a melancholic tune of a conch.

 

The sky in the morn is bloomed

By the flocks of swans: their new songs

Trigger the new dawns-

The pink waves of the river talk a lot-

And they keep murmuring all along;

Yet their words are never devoured by the winter fog.

Someone sitting in the petals of a painted cloud,

Is listening to everything-

Or no one is listening at all;

Everything fades out in the blank mist.

 

I too will be wiped out one day like a spectrum;

And yet I sit on the green grass; fall in love;

Wait in a solitary seclusion for the sounds of footsteps,

With the yearnings of her love; collect the wild plums-

I’m supposed to give them to someone.

One can sit for hours on this soft grass,

Alone, with all such dreams;

And when it will be the time to sleep,

I will close my eyes. 

 

© Atique R.

It’s a translation of the Bengali poem, ‘Ei Prithibite Ami Obosor Niye Sudhu Asiachi,’ by Jibanananda Das.

If I Get an Eternal Life

 

If I get an eternal life,

If I can go on walking alone

On the paths of earth forever,

I will watch how the leaves grow green;

I’ll see how they turn pale and go off the scene;

I’ll behold how the sky becomes white in the dawn,

And is drawn to dusk with a reddish hue on its chest,

Like the blood splash of a slain munia.

I’ll be able to meet the stars, again and again;

I will see an unknown girl going away

With her hair freed from a loosely locked bun:

Her face missing the comely touch of twilight. 

         

If I really get a life without an end,

If I can roam around the roads of the world,

Alone, for eternity-for a time without bend-

I will see countless trams, buses and dust;

I’ll see bunches of slums, huts, swampy lanes,

Broken chillums and urns;

I will see quarrels here and there.

I’ll watch street fights, squint eyes, rotten shrimps-

And countless other things,

I won’t be able to put into words.

And still I won’t be able to see

A glimpse of you

In my eternal life,

Ever again.  

 

© Atique R.

It’s a translation of the Bengali poem, ‘Ononto Jibon Jodi Pai Ami,’ by Jibanananda Das.