Culture & Society

'Palaces Have Become Tents Of Trees'

Boudhayan Mukherjee, a bilingual poet and translator, writes two poems for Outlook

Illustration: Vikas Thakur
Photo: Illustration: Vikas Thakur
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Chungthang, Sikkim

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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