Selected Poems Read online

  At its booming sound.

  30

  The frenzy dies down,

  The furnace expires,

  The planets douse

  Their flames with tears.

  The world’s Divine Poet

  35

  Constructs its history,

  From wild cosmic song

  Its epic is formed.

  Stars in their orbits,

  Moon sun and planets –

  40

  He binds with his mace

  All things to Law,

  Imposes the discipline

  Of metre and rhyme.

  In the Mānasa depths

  45

  Visu watches –

  Beauties arise

  From the light of lotuses.

  Laksmī strews smiles –

  Clouds show a rainbow,

  50

  Gardens show flowers.

  The roar of Creation

  Resolves into music.

  Softness hides rigour,

  Forms cover power.

  55

  Age after age after age is slave to a mighty rhythm –

  At last the world-frame

  Tires in its body,

  Sleep in its eyes

  Slackens its structure,

  60

  Diffuses its energy.

  From the heart of all matter

  Comes the anguished cry –

  ‘Wake, wake, great Śiva,

  Our body grows weary

  65

  Of its law-fixed path,

  Give us new form.

  Sing our destruction,

  That we gain new life.’

  The great god awakes,

  70

  His three eyes open,

  He surveys all horizons.

  He lifts his bow, his fell pināka,

  He pounds the world with his tread.

  From first things to last it trembles and shakes

  75

  And shudders.

  The bonds of nature are ripped.

  The sky is rocked by the roar

  Of a wave of ecstatic release.

  An inferno soars –

  80

  The pyre of the universe.

  Shattered sun and moon, smashed stars and planets

  Rain down from all angles,

  A blackness of particles

  To be swallowed by flame,

  85

  Absorbed in an instant.

  At the start of Creation

  There was dark without origin,

  At the breaking of Creation

  There is fire without end.

  90

  In an all-pervading sky-engulfing sea of burning

  Śiva shuts his three eyes.

  He begins his great trance.

  Bride

  ‘Day’s ending, let’s go and fetch water.’

  I seem to hear from afar that old evening call –

  But where is the shade and the water?

  Where are the steps and the fig-tree?

  5

  As I sit alone with my thoughts I seem to hear

  ‘Day’s ending, let’s go and fetch water.’

  Pitcher at my hip, the winding path –

  Nothing but fields to the left stretching into haze,

  To the right the slanting bamboo-grove.

  10

  The evening sunlight shines on the blackness of the pool,

  The woods round its edge are sunk in shade.

  I let myself idly float in the pool’s deep calm,

  The koel on the bank has sweetness in its song.

  Returning, I suddenly see above the dark trees,

  15

  Painted on the sky, the moon.

  The wall, split by the peepul-tree –

  I used to run there when I woke.

  On autumn mornings the world glistened with dew,

  Clusters of oleanders bloomed.

  20

  Two creepers covering the wall with their flow of green

  Were laden with purple flowers.

  I sat in my hiding-place peering through cracks,

  My sari trailed on the ground.

  Field after field, and on the horizon

  25

  A distant village blending with the sky.

  Next to me ancient palm-trees stand so densely

  Their dark-green foliage merges.

  I can see the dam’s thin line, its water glinting,

  Herd-boys crowd its edge.

  30

  The path goes on out of sight, I do not know where –

  Who knows through what new places?

  Oh this city with its stony body!

  Its massive loveless fist has squeezed and crushed

  A young girl’s feelings, pitilessly.

  35

  Where are the boundless fields, the open path,

  The birdsong, the trees, the shadows?

  There seem to be people all around me,

  I can’t speak my heart in case they hear me.

  Weeping is wasted here, it is stopped by walls,

  40

  My weeping always comes back to me.

  No one understands why I cry,

  They wonder, they want to know the cause.

  ‘Nothing pleases the girl, she ought to be ashamed,

  It’s always the same with girls from villages.

  45

  All these friends and relations to keep her company,

  But she sits in a corner and shuts her eyes!’

  They point at my body or face,

  They argue about how I look –

  I feel like a garland-seller, my wares examined,

  50

  Tested for quality, coldly.

  I loiter alone amidst them all,

  Each day hangs so heavily.

  People here are like worms crawling between bricks,

  There is no love, there is no gaiety.

  55

  What of you, mother, where are you?

  You can’t have forgotten me, surely?

  When you sit outside on our roof beneath the new moon

  Do you still tell fairy-stories?

  Or do you, alone in bed, lie awake at night,

  60

  In tears and sickness of heart?

  Take flowers to the temple at dawn to offer your prayers

  For your exiled daughter’s well-being?

  Here also the moon rises over the roof,

  Its light is at my door and begs for entry.

  65

  I feel that it wandered widely before it found me

  It sought me because it loved me.

  I forget myself for a moment,

  I rush to fling open the door.

  At once the spies all around me rise like a storm,

  70

  Swoop with their cruel authority.

  They won’t give love, they won’t give light.

  I feel all the time it would be good to die,

  To sink in the lap of the water of the pool,

  In its shady darkness, its cool black depths.

  75

  Keep on, keep on with your evening call –

  ‘Day’s ending, let’s go and fetch water.’

  When will my evening come? All playing end?

  The cooling water quench all fires?

  If anyone knows, tell me when.

  Unending Love

  I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times

  In life after life, in age after age forever.

  My spell-bound heart has made and re-made the necklace of songs

  That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms

  5

  In life after life, in age after age forever.

  Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, its age-old pain,

  Its ancient tale of being apart or together,

  As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge

  Clad in the ligh
t of a pole-star piercing the darkness of time:

  10

  You become an image of what is remembered forever.

  You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount

  At the heart of time love of one for another.

  We have played alongside millions of lovers, shared in the same

  Shy sweetness of meeting, the same distressful tears of farewell –

  15

  Old love, but in shapes that renew and renew forever.

  Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you,

  The love of all man’s days both past and forever:

  Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life,

  The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours –

  20

  And the songs of every poet past and forever.

  The Meghadūta

  Ah, supreme poet, that first, hallowed day

  Of Äsārh on which, in some unknown year, you wrote

  Your Meghadūta! Your stanzas are themselves

  Like dark-layered sonorous clouds, heaping the misery

  5

  Of all separated lovers throughout the world

  Into thunderous music.

  Who can say what thickness of cloud that day,

  What festiveness of lightning, what wildness of wind

  Shook with their roar the turrets of Ujjayini?

  10

  As the thunderclouds clashed, their booming released

  In a single day the heart-held grief of thousands of years

  Of pining. Long-repressed tears,

  Breaking time’s bonds, seem to have poured down

  In torrents that day and drenched your noble stanzas.

  15

  Did every exile in the world that day

  Raise his head, clasp his hands, face his beloved’s home

  And sing to the clouds one and the same

  Song of yearning? Did each lover ask a fresh, unfettered cloud

  To carry on its wings a tearful message of love

  20

  To the distant window where his beloved

  Lay wretched on the ground with clothes disordered

  And hair unplaited and weeping eyes?

  Did your music, O poet, carry all their songs

  As you journeyed in your poem through land after land

  25

  Over many days and nights

  Towards the lonely object of your love?

  Compare the Ganges in full monsoon flood,

  Absorbing streams from every side till all become one in the sea.

  Compare the vapour that mountains,

  30

  Prisoners of their own stone, send forth in Äsārh:

  Jealous of the freedom with which clouds pass above them,

  They breathe it from a thousand caverns:

  It rises fast as desire, unites over the peaks

  And becomes in the end a great mass dominating the sky.

  35

  Since that day, countless first days

  Of the cooling rainy season have passed.

  Every year has given new life to your poem

  By showering it with fresh rain,

  By spreading cool shade, by echoing once again

  40

  With the sound of gathered clouds, by filling streams

  With waves that rush like your rain-swelled verse.

  All this time, companionless people have sat in loveless rooms

  Through the long, rain-weary, starless evenings of Äsārh.

  In faint lamplight, they have slowly read aloud that verse

  45

  And drowned their own loneliness.

  Their voices come to me from your poem;

  They sound in my ear like waves on the sea-shore.

  In the easternmost part of India,

  In verdurous Bengal, I sit.

  50

  Here too the poet Jayadeva watched on a rainy day

  The blue-green shadows of distant tamāl-trees,

  The density of a sky in full cloud.

  Today is a dark day, the rain is incessant,

  The wind ferocious – treetops rise

  55

  Like arms at its attack; their swishing is a cry.

  Lightning darts through the clouds, ripping them,

  Dotting the sky with sharp, crooked smiles.

  In a gloomy closed room I sit alone

  And read the Meghadūta. My mind leaves the room,

  60

  Travels on a free-moving cloud, flies far and wide.

  There is the Amrakūta mountain,

  There is the clear and slender Revā river,

  Tumbling over stones in the Vindhya foothills;

  There, along the banks of the Vetravati,

  65

  Hiding in the shade of green, ripe-fruited jambu-trees,

  Are the villages of Daśāra, their fences streaming

  With ketaki-flowers their paths lined with great forest-trees

  Whose overhanging branches are alive with the twitter of village-birds

  Building their nests in the rain.

  70

  There is that unknown stream along whose jasmine-wooded banks

  Forest-girls idly wander:

  Lotuses at their ears wilt from the heat of their cheeks

  And are desperate for the shade of the cloud.

  See how the village-wives stare up at the sky:

  75

  Simple women – no coyness in their gaze

  As the cloud’s thick blue shadow falls on their dark blue eyes!

  See how the Siddha women languishing on a cloud-blue rock

  Revel in the cloud’s looming coolness; but at the sudden onset of its storm

  Cower, rush back to their caves

  80

  Clutching their clothes and crying, ‘Help,

  Help, it’ll blow the mountains down!’

  There is Avantī and the Nirvindhyā river;

  There is Ujjayinī, gazing at her own great shadow in the Śiprā river.

  It is midnight, and the doves in her towers

  85

  Sleep away love’s urges: but women, restless with desire,

  Go out into the broad dark streets to await their trysts

  While lightning pricks through the gloom.

  There is Kuruksetra, in the land of Brahmāvarta!

  There is the peak of Kanakhala, where the wild youthful foam of the Ganges

  90

  Played with Śiva’s hair, laughed at his consort’s frown

  As it touched his moon-crest.

  My heart travels thus, like a cloud, from land to land

  Until it floats at last into Alakā –

  Heavenly, longed-for city

  95

  Where pines that most loved of loves,