Chungthang, Sikkim
'Palaces Have Become Tents Of Trees'
Boudhayan Mukherjee, a bilingual poet and translator, writes two poems for Outlook
Photo: Illustration: Vikas Thakur
Photo: Illustration: Vikas Thakur
What is it I searched all my life
And never found ? Ah , now I know , my child !
The snow melts into water-----
Beside the waterfall I cup my palms
A quick cascade of desire is pooled.
I drink like a slave, the slow trickle
Falling off my elbows to seep under-soil.
Was my posture pre dominantly human
Or it resembled a single tree?
The winds loaf about ,always whimsical .
The forest leans towards the morbid hill.
Ants and rodents, hedgehog’s cloaca
Are preserved by water that makes me drink.
I’ve known a bird whose music
Sleeps beside the limpid water on my palms.
It’s very cold here
The soil around my feet grows like love
Of a frigid woman unable to explode.
A slow drizzle may cover the valley downhill,
The water munching grass as it descends.
A starry night over Kanchenjungha trembles with sin
Wavering delight for my eyes, my shady eye-brows
Do not twitch as the muscles are pure as fruit.
A night bird pecks at it, but does not blind me.
A mild hump of water on a stone I can still see.
Conflagration
Suddenly the peak of the distant hill
becomes red.
The holy footprints of Sita
hypothecated closely to the earth
ravish my eyes.
The forest drowse like an opium-eater
and leans towards
the liberal valley below.
The domain of oranges are here
amidst jhoom cultivation.
Palaces have become tents of trees;
the silent moon plays with emerald leaves
unable to comprehend red sodomy
capping the peak.
An unknown bird returns
with lost sorrows in it's beaks.
The grief of metamorphic rocks
turn in turmoil.
Animals run helter skelter
I only come back in emphysema
from the doom of charred trees
in conflagration.
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