Buddhadeva Bose

DESERT JOURNEY

While he could still turn back, he understood nothing.
And then there was only sand and bared horizons:
thorny bushes, spiders a skeleton or two of camels.
Encircling the villages of language, a vast and violent sky

Brutally raped all thought, reduced it to ashes,
and itself was slowly stilled. The sun cooked his flesh
in his own fat, dressing him for another birth as it were.
And his thirst followed him like a pack of dogs.

Mirages ripped at last, the first palm appeared
and in dark rings on the sand a hint of pregnancy—
down on his knees, he dug with frenzied fingers:

the trickle was thin for thirst. Yet the cool touch
evoked a change of season. From wetted hands hung fruit,
and an evening azan rose through the throat soothed by sight.


EXILE

Your gentle hands I never can escape.
so small, so full of distance, and yet somehow
they scatter pollen to touch me in exile.
And darkly through the stones a stream begins to gush,

like one not seen, but heard with body’s rapture
by a traveler who has lost his way in a forest.
Has my tremendous toil then come to nothing?
How hard I’d worked to leave behind

the village mango-grove and build a safe retreat,
arrogant and cold, enclosed in glabrous walls,
invulnerable to mercy and the seasons.

And yet my tower stands because it’s filled
with your absence and the imperceptible
touch of you I never can escape.


TO MY UNWRITTEN POEMS

I

Only one for birth, but death has many doors;
knee-deep water, microbes, a drop or two of poison.
And its effect is never either less or more:
a Shelley dies as much as desiccated hag.

And dying begins even before the birth.
A single mango costs a million blossoms’ ruin;
although a thousand chances start on the way together,
all are lost on the way, except the lucky one—

not the best or bravest—which hits the gaping womb.
Maybe he’s just a nobody, but because alive and present,
gaily the world forgets the unborn Sun of Valor.

—You, who on the frontier still lie dimly huddled,
do not blame me. I am always open:
it’s you who are weak, too weak to penetrate.

II

You who elected me, but then absorbed
in the seasons’ merry-go-round, forgot the day is brief,
who sometimes send me letters that sigh between the lines,
but if I offer the ring, postpone the consummation,

or leave no more than a kiss, or kiss the wind until
everywhere spread the spaces where grapes most gladly ripen,
or sometimes with eyes like a sunset’s afterglow—

changeful, fleeting, indefinite—
suffuse my heart with desire and frustration:
to you I say: though many a time I’ve launched
on barely tolerable expeditions,

yet all the tale is not attack and skill.
There were some who cancelled the vast, astonished debts
and captured me at once. Maybe they matter most.

III

but who can tell? . . . Are you not intimates
embedded in each of my days and epochs of the heart,
nurtured by the years in the midst of natural darkness,
bright as a coral reel tossed up by sharks and storms,

and secretly tinged with the red of younger-growing dawns?
Maybe I’m slack, forgetful. But in dreamy clouds of sleep
you are the stars that come; in my bath you startle me;

with me straphang in trams, get mixed in my curried fish.
Why malinger then? In girlish coquetry
why still put to test the range of preparation?

Come, strike out, assume I’m unconcerned,
let fall you instant blow and ravish me like lightning.
If not the honey of heaven, or a tryst with Urvashi,
bring a fearful blast aglow with salt and sulfur.


FOR MY FORTY-EIGHT WINTER

Draw the window curtains, there’s nothing to see outside.
All are mere seducers—those grasses shimmering skies.
Remove the dolls and goldfish, clear the room of flowers,
and put your trust in the monotonous void.

There’s nothing anywhere: close your sight and hearing.
Which sage can teach what’s not already yours?
Better accept the primal Sinbad load—
laboring like an ass all day to fit a pair of rhymes.

Winter drops anchor: what else do you need?
Pure walls arise with seas and continents,
the tints of changing time dissolve in each other;

and, bared of the patchwork quilt of sunlight, starlight,
the world recedes, gets lost in darkness,
challenging you to the task of restoration.


SONNETS FOR 3 AM

I

Only the personal is holy. A shaded lamp
when evening deepens, darkness spread like a sky
around the hidden star of a yellowed page:
or a letter written in the shy half-sleep of midnight,

slowly, to a distant friend. Do you think that Christ
was a philanthropist? or Buddha a committee chairman,
hard-working venerable, loquacious,
dribbling vain saliva? Far from the drums and watchmen

of the wholesale vendors of salvation,
softly they walk their ways of vagrancy.
I say, let go the world, let go where it will.

Be small, inscrutable, be deafened with delight
that half an hour warmly shared with a woman
can give much more that the helpers’ hue and cry.

II

All of this is not for you. Only the book lies open,
Those who smile and chant in tune with tinkling tea-cups
become, when the night is late and neighbors’ lights are out,
cockroaches and scurrying pantry mice,

Fighting for bits of food. Being ignorant
of welcoming feast, they take the droppings for history.
Not this, for you. Learn what flowers, fruit
and the seasons teach as they come and go.

Leave no address. Like spring in blank December,
vanquished, forgotten, conspiratorial,
go far, to distant lands where nobody speaks your tongue,

and you wander uncertain, anonymous,
with eternity whispering to your heart
in the stars’ inhuman language, now and then.

Translated from the Bengali by the poet



Buddhadeva Bose (1908-1974) is a major Bengali modernist of the twentieth century. His poetry has been reprinted from the anthology, I Have Bengal’s Face, edited by Sibnarayan Ray and Marian Maddern, Editions Indian, 1974.