If I Were a Wild Swan

 

‘If I Were a Wild Swan’ is a translated poem, with a slight change from the original one (Ami Jodi Hotam) by Jibanananda Das, the pioneer of the modern Bengali poetry, the uncrowned maestro of mind-stunning metaphors: my first love like millions of Bengali readers who like to read a couple of lines from a poem, sometimes in a lonely leisure on a rainy day or on a moon blanched night or in a winter morn or anytime anywhere with a hot cup of tea or without. His works have got an undeniable impact on readers or poetry lovers, avid or nonchalant, who can neither feel nor deny that there is something to be indulged in, there is definitely something to be lost with an outpour felt deep inside in the life on the other end of the reality.

Ami Jodi Hotam (If I Were) was translated into English by the poet himself and was published in the 1945 anthology of Modern Bengali Poems. However; I have never had the opportunity to go through that version of the poem. But, I did dare, may be for my love for the poet and for the imagery, to try my own version with a little change as I didn’t feel like bringing along another swan to be shot down…

 

If I Were a Wild Swan

If I were a wild swan

In a quiet nest,

Deep inside a swamp bush,

Close to a wheat field,

By a calm, rainy river

By the end of a horizon;

 

On such a night of spring

With the moon rising above the cedar woods,

I would glide along the silvery crops in the sky,

Leaving behind the lure of the maddening smell

Of warm water of the marshes-

 

With my feathers feeling the touches of your wings;

My wings in the beats of your veins-

A million stars glowing the deep blue sky,

Like the golden flowers flaming the wheat field;

With the March Moon looking like a golden egg

In the green furry nest of maple grove.

The sound of a sudden gunshot:

My diagonal fall,

With the joy of ecstatic piston on my back,

And the songs of the north wind in my tone!

 

May be the second gunshot:

My stunned silence,

My peace.

There wouldn’t be the fractions of death anymore

Like the life we are dragging on…

There wouldn’t be any burden of despairs

With the unfulfillment of our little hopes,

There wouldn’t be any darkness, either;

If I were a wild swan,

By a calm, rainy river

By the end of a horizon,

Close to a wheat field…

 

 

© Atique R.

Dreamversation

 

Can I borrow a couple of your moments,

Before the moon picks up its beaming glow?

Can I ask you something,

Before my winging words lose the courage

And find the floating mist in a hiding flow?

Though, a lot of things I’m dying to know,

But, a few or a couple will be just fine:

You’re so busy, and I’m in such a withering time.

All you need is to respond in just ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

Sounds so simple, aint’t it? I guess so.

 

I’ve got so many questions getting spiralled,

Squeezing my heart: at least I feel that way.

Do you ever feel choked,

With thousands of questions in a boiling bay;

Tangled and the words severed off their wings,

Before trying to fly out off their death?

And that makes me feel just out of breath…

But, can you please tell me

Before the white dove

Sails past all the seas of lives;

Before a wandering soul

Walks past all his miles..?

 

Suppose, there is no oxygen issue;

But still, you are feeling suffocated for someone,

Someone keeping a deafening silence.

Have you ever experienced anything like this?

Anything that way, in a camouflaged patience?

Do you ever feel

Kind of taking in a breath of peace,

With a long sigh of relief,

Just after seeing someone online-

Like discovering an island

After a series of storm in a troubled sea-

After hours of impatient attempts

To feel someone’s virtual presence:

And still without texting any single word,

Sharing just nothing,

Nothing but a bunch of frozen sighs?

Unreachable, indeed, but there is still something.

 

Do you ever check your WhatsApp account

Just to see the login status of someone else?

Do you ever feel the craziness,

Making you feel like a bubble

With the burden of an unfathomable emptiness?

Have you ever found your feelings got stuck

In a one-way ride to the moon?

I don’t know if you ever feel the way I feel;

For anyone, ever in your dimensional zone?    

 

Have you ever been in a conversation

With someone, without uttering a single word,

For a soul laden with passion,

Breathing so hard to find a catharsis?

Do you believe anything like telekinesis:

Like sending the words from soul to the seas?

I wish I could send you my wingless words too;

Not the feelings, just words,

Millions of words,

As my feelings can hardly be painted with letters.

 

Have you ever talked to someone

Entirely in your imagination?

I call it dreamversation,

That I keep doing in my subconscious mind,

Or may be in my unconsciousness too,

With you: several times a day and at night

In my lonely leisure or whatever,

With the moon rising high

Or hiding somewhere,

With the monsoon rain

Drenching the soul of the earth

And of mine,

Or without it:

 

Without ever thinking the Meghbalika

I see in the canvas of my heart

Belongs to a parallel world,

And I’m just nowhere,

With all my dreamversations

Landing in a nothing-sphere.

 

 

©Atique R.

Death by Thunder on Such a Night

 

I planned it a long ago

To make a voyage with Death

Into a deep blue sea

To give away my breath;

And to brave the dreadful uncertainty,

With a farewell to life and its labyrinth:

May be in the twilight

With the splashes of melting gold

Into the relentless blue,

Ushering in a moon blanched night,

With a derailed drizzle in a dreamy light.

 

But on such a night

With all the shadowed dreams

Floating like a bunch of foamy clouds;

With all those unfinished jobs

Dwindling into the droplets of moon shrouds;

With all those meaningless promises

Hiding in the flow of enchanting jasmine;

With all those maddening night bloomers,

Glowing like fireflies in a starry shine-

Too beautiful to be real in a floating light,

With a nightingale and an aura of taking a flight…

 

But on such a night

After waking up from a beautiful dream

With an intense feeling for one more ride

Into the flow of an eternal stream;

With the blissful drops of a monsoon rain

After a long lingering summer pain,

I feel like walking alone,

Along a river in the rain,

With all my melting memories

Streaming down from the valley of my heart

Into the rivulets of a singing cloudburst…

 

On such a night

The ocean seems to be too far.

The relentless blue

Can be forgotten too

Like many other things for an unreal future.

On such a night

I feel like taking the short surreal sleep

To wake up to eternity.

Just a fraction of a second…

And the night looks so fairer to surrender.

Just a random bohemian thunder…a death by thunder.

 

©Atique R.

One More Reborn

 

Under the new Moon,

As I was flying high

Above the Mediterranean,

I happened to meet

An accident       

With a mountain

Of shrouding clouds

From heaven.

 

I lost the track

In the enchanting trail

Of a familiar smell

That I was mad at, once

A thousand years back.

 

No more blood;

No more sensation

In the radiation of warm flesh

I want now yet another reborn…

 

©Atique R.

Dead Enough

 

I had a dream

With the mirage

Of a dark red ocean

Confined in

A many-layered den.

 

And with colors;

In so many shades

And variations,

Splashing in

Like a stream

With a bunch of frozen sighs.

 

Then I woke up

With the cold touch of

A cloud passing by;

As I was looking

Down from the sky

At my blood stained body,

Lying immobile in a relentless blue:

Dead enough to see

What the dream could signify.   

 

©Atique R.

Parisian Perfume

 

The half-eaten Moon

Was crawling past the night

When I met my dandelion girl

Walking along the forbidden street

With the flickering shadows

In the shimmering light.

 

And it was blood all around

Spreading the smell of Parisian perfume.

Amidst the drizzle and a muffled sound

I found my smeared body

Lying prostrate on the blood-soaked ground.

 

Then my eyes full of red flung open.

 

© Atique R.

My Tell-Tale Love

 

I can see you with my eyes closed;

I can see you with my senses dozed.

I can feel you with the weakest beat of my heart;

I can feel you even with my mind forced to shut.

And my insolent eyes still keep searching you

In the crowd or in silence,

In my helpless impatience;

In the chaos or in emptiness,

In my harbored loneliness…

 

Once I saw you in black,

And you were looking stunning.

The other day you were in pink

And suddenly I knew

Why roses were so mind-blowing.

I saw you in red, blue, white, green,

And many other colors-to me unknown;

And I kept feeling the autumn calm or spring within,

Sometimes a tornado and some other times a cyclone.

Hundreds of such images are there in my heart or somewhere,

And I can keep shuffling them one after the other.

And still, I want to see you in red, blue, pink or green

To feel the flow of jasmine or the nor’wester

For a million more times by a timeless ocean…

 

I watch my heart falling to pieces

In the break of every single dawn.

I see my winging dreams crashing

With my befooling imagination.

I see your nonchalant look

Doesn’t seem to know me anymore.

I see your magical eyes going far and far,

Though close like a Moon; yet nowhere near.

And still, I wanna dream you in the Sun

With the sweat of a searing summer noon.

And still, I wanna fall for you a thousand more times

With the glowing hopes of every new Moon.

Still, I wanna love you with a maddening obsession,

And a passion going beyond every reason,

And I still want to love you, dear,

With my eyes taking in the whole monsoon.

 

©Atique R.

The Rhyme Trilogy

 

1.

My Little River, Rhyme

 

-Have I ever told you about a river?

-Which river?

- The river flowing in a magical symphony, down the valley of my village. I call it Rhyme.

-Is that a part of your dream too?

-Yes, but more real than the rivers I came across in my another world what you call ‘real’.

-What do you do with that one?

-Kind of a place: serene, quiet and beautiful that I usually love to take resort to in a rough day. I can spend hours together just by sitting by the river while watching the flow of crystal clear water: blue like an ocean.

-When did you meet her?

-In one of my wayward wanderings deep down the wilderness. I was in search of a shade of ashen clouds in a hot summer noon and was following a gentle breeze with the smell of a faraway jasmine and an enchantingly beautiful song of the dancing water which seemed to be flowing on for a date with a nearby bay. The coastal part is yet to be undiscovered though.

-Haven’t you got that far yet? 

- Couldn’t make it. It always took me hours of trekking along a long mountainous way to get to my favorite tree by the bank of the river. Which is where I always get stuck by. And it always starts drizzling as soon as I get under the caring shelter of its branches. Couldn’t just resist the idea of dropping down my tired soul and giving it a break from weaving layers after layers of a delusional dream.

I’ll talk to you in another dream. Feeling terribly sleepy now after a week long sleepless night, without a nightingale to escape with …

 

2.

Raining on the Rhyme

 

I was talking to you

The other night

In another dream

In a delusional light

About my little river Rhyme,

Flowing down a broken valley

From a wuthering height.

 

On my way back home

From the melting colors of time

I caught sight of

A tiring twilight

From the falling Rome.

And that was when

I winged back

To my unfinished dream

Of the Rhyme in the rain

With the petals of my draining pain.

 

But the tree was not there anymore

And the branches were all gone.

The drizzling was a little heavier;

But the jasmine kept flowing on.

And it was time to move on

Along the dancing river

To weave the destined bay;

For we both needed a beach

And an infinite blue to reach.

 

But, I was not sure

If I could set the wings free,

Or the stream could make it to the sea;

For the dreams are not always

Flowing like a fluting autumn tree

To take you wherever you wanna be…

But, I kept walking along Rhyme,

My lovely little river in a rain

To set my floating dream free

And to let my fading soul

Fetch the blue from the sea…

3.

Rhyme Keeps Flowing on…

 

The road was narrow, hard and wild,

With upward and downward slopes

And I used to take that thoroughfare

With all my melting infant hopes.

And I used to sprint past

The hundred meter long dread

Piercing through a gray graveyard

 In the heart of the wayward woods,

For there was a long tree

With the smell of roasted beans;

For there was an untold tale

Of a pale-haired witch, as old as Tiresias

With the truths and its trail.

But, there was a river at the end...

 

With all those messed up visions

In the whirlwind

Of my frantic teenage dreams

I used to run past the woods,

The carefree graveyard in shades

Of the autumn yellow streams;

I used to chase down

The tempting scary thrills

To be in the flow of

The miles long corn fields

With the soothingly mysterious wind

Flowing in from somewhere unknown,

From a different time, untamed.

But the river was not Rhyme,

But the seed was so fervently sowed.

 

And now my little river Rhyme

Keeps showing up

In my many layered dreams;

For, now I can weave

All those silenced shrieking pains

Into the dreams of a summer rain,

For, now I can change

The smell of roasted beans

Into the drizzling of jasmine;

For now the river in my childish dream

Don’t get stuck in the charm of a terrain;

For, now the Rhyme keeps flowing on

All the way towards my blue ocean.

 

©Atique R.