Poetry: Translation from Hindi

Poet: Naresh Saxena 
Translator: Sanjeev Kaushal

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Rain on the Sea

What can the sea do

What can it do with so much salt

Countless rivers arrived and disappeared 

No one knows- where

It has no account of 

How many it turned into vapour

Yet all the rivers of the world

Carrying all the salt of the earth 

Rush towards it

What can it do

How can it summon 

The sweet water fish

How can it face the thirsty

Where can it drown itself

The sea cries shame on the self

It rains on the sea

Who doesn’t need salt

Why must the sea alone 

Carry all of it

Is it a punishment

For its leap over gravity

Or a reaction against its size

No one knows

If there is salt in its primitive memory

There is no salt in its dreams, I know 

Since childhood

I have been aware

Of its longing for a spoonful of sugar

The sea laments

Within the three fourths of my body-

Now cloud

Now ice

Now ice

Now cloud.

***

 

Hunger

First it eats the brain

Then the eyes 

Then the remains of the body

It spares nothing

It eats relationships,

Be it mother, sister or children

It relishes children particularly,

And devours them 

First and foremost

What remains once the children are finished.

***

Termites

Termites don’t know 

How to read

They devour

The whole book.

***

Metals

With its separation from the Sun

The Earth began to rotate 

And with this began

Magnetism and the role of metals 

There was a metal age even before the Metal Age

There is a metal age even after the Metal Age

Who says metals don’t flower

These days, 

After water

They are most often found 

In fruits and flowers

Through fish and birds

They fuse sky with ocean 

When we leave for office or market

Or return home

They surround us in smoke 

And start dissolving in our blood

Metallurgists are worried over

Their unequal deposits on Earth,

They are depositing in hearts

Kidneys, nails, skin, and roots of hair

Right now they are spreading in our thoughts 

But one day

We will find them resting in our souls

What will happen then?

Hot in summer and cold in winter

Our souls will stretch when pulled

And flatten when hammered

It’s not that people are completely oblivious of it 

Many a time my friends ask me 

Dear Naresh

What metal is it that you are made of?

***

 

Table

The criminal was sharp as a poet

Who looked at a swaying tree

And said, look a table is swaying 

It was the table where he noticed

Fruits, flowers and chirping birds 

Finally, he spread a tablecloth

Over the swaying tree

I hate tablecloths 

Let my back be bare 

There are stripes there

Where my age is preserved 

Each stripe represents a year 

When seasons change

Stripes still pulsate with sensation 

During the rain every nerve is wrenched

Let my back be bare

Maybe one day 

A different kind of poet 

Will recognise me

Pull me out of the poem and

Carry me to the stairs of a court even if dragging

And appeal to the judge 

To count the stripes on my back

And the nails thrust in it

Will any judge see the lashing whips

And the marks emerging among the stripes 

On bowed backs

Because His Honour 

Will also have a table

With a tablecloth spread over it.

***  

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Setu September 2021