Poet: Naresh Saxena
Translator: Sanjeev Kaushal
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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