On My Birthday
Return me to the simple city
Where after the ten-to-five
Tired people fearlessly head home;
The sunset's vermilion daub in the west,
In home after home housewives bathe,
And in the concealing darkness waywardbabus
Slip into neighborhoods of ill-repute.
...
Never do the old days return.
I look up at the sky,
At where the ball of fire
Burns heedlessly;
Dust blows, the bald oak with its head held high
Stands in a tired, old pose.
Youth returns to trees every year
While we drown in the mire of our acts.
This easy life, then death--
Which is moonlight above the oak tree
Or else fog upon a desolate hill.
O Dhrupadi, peace is not ours to possess;
On our journey from sleeplessness to nightmare
Crows caw,
The dark sound of a sunblackened, anxious face.
In Bengal, in Bihar in voices free of thunder
Twisted corpses cry
We walk to the graveyard
Or to the burning ghats.
Death perhaps brings amity:
All are equal at the cessation of being--
Bihar's Hindu and Noakhali's Muslim
Noakhali's Hindu and Bihar's Muslim
2.No longer do I hear the sea's song
Gone is the beat of trams and buses from my blood.
I have forgotten the red earth of tribal lands
The hills that once rose on the horizon,
The springsongs heard in the nautch-girl's throng .
I have forgotten the adda-langour of the bazaarways
Baliganj's vamped-up rice,
DalhousieÂs and Clive Street's sequined delirium
The foreign cry of ships at the dock.
No more does a sick Romanticism flower in my poems.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel. Youthful love ends in old man's lust.
About ten years more, then I to Benares.
Uma Rahman is a writer/translator based in Bangalore.
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