Forward To Books

Here, in this book of mine
Drawn are numerous pictures
Assets of this traversing age.
The willingness with which this Earth after its birth
Draws the signs of life
Numerous animals, birds, and growth of plants,
And their shadows
Are here on each page of mine, on each line,
On each word, and next to each sound pattern.
 Do excuse me of this pride,
You know with what juice is built the interior of creation,
Where none can own anything
Everyone is covered with the roof of the same sky,
Below the soil buries.
There, please, place mine this
Forward to books.

On The Death Of A Female Friend

The greenery spreads and is lost
On the sound of my footsteps
Weighing each moment of life
With tiny spoons
Which sparkle in sunlight
I witnessed
Bound in the chain of nonchalance
Even the very brave nightingales
Their two legs are exhausted
The gust of wind
Binds the wings of the wild grasshoppers
With springs.

I continued to stare
At the smoky horizon
Blurred with bitterness
The beckoning
And saw
The days that are already over
Like the stone on the glass box
Which sparkles
Between my hands.

The Gift

The whistling of the wind
Loses its way crossing the cut banana leaves.

Do I live or die in the
Clear scent of the wind
Find or lose the shade of simple satisfaction.

Even you do not know that in the
Floating scent of each flower, in the
Easy whistling of each bird,
  Is the single signal of the road to Diksou.

The person inside me is
Calm in his desperation.
With his both hands, he collects
 Each of your gifts
— of love and hatred.

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Digsou: Name of a place

Zibrail at Andromeda

Azazel laughed at me for being an ‘attar’ seller
Azazel is evil,
These days he laughs at everyone.
Wants to destroy itself in laughter,
In blood collected in an earthen pot,
The blood where floods the wondrous cells of life
Where it is experienced
Spanning six hundred crore light-year
   The blooming scent of flowers.

On my wings the tiredness of two billion light-years
Of pale, dwarf stars!
As if I stepped on the grass of the moment
A broken drop of scarlet, citrus dew
Like an arrow I passed through
The ancient space of the milkyway.
The screams of blood-tinged demon planets
The murky tunnel of the soul of the demoness of darkness
As if it licked with an unseen tongue its own death.
The revealed heart of desire and contentment
The endlessness of the excessiveness. I’m without a body,
In the unspeakable haste of the journey, I turn to ashes.

Not the business of ‘attar’
I had a surprising hobby of harvesting
   Roses.
Even when squeezing just a flower I
Never could lean how to make a drop of fragrance.
Colliding in the ancient milky way
As if crossing the mud-filled lanes of Chesamukh
The wheels of the bullock cart
Sprinkling of mud and water, washed over by the rain
Where is buried
The tiny family of the smaller sun
On whose piece of land, covering it with fences of time
I had planted numerous roses.
In the hearts of the animals that
 Burn in nuclear blaze,
In the palace of fountains
On the face of the famished beggar boy of Jambu Dweep!
Even when squeezing just a flower I
Never could lean  how to make a drop of fragrance.

This gathering of Andromeda’s planets among the crores of constellations
This shore
Crossing the pitch dark ocean of loneliness
That dream that doesn’t have an end, nibbles each atom of my body
Each beat of the heart,
That animal heart of billion of planets!
Even I’m dark, stony, I’m without body
Blaze in brightness in the thorny bush.
Numerous offspring of uncountable suns
Springs up like a forest
In the burial ground of solitude!
Floats, riding the boat, the indigo sage of the space
Burning in the funeral pyre of the heart the indigo scream.

Next to it lights up an empty pool of the light of boundless boundary!
I? I’m as if Sofura’s husband
Rob the palace of fountains!

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Zibrail: Also known as Gabriel, an archangel
Andromeda: The Andromeda Galaxy is a spiral galaxy approximately 2.6 million light-years (2.5×1019 km) from Earth in the constellation Andromeda
Azazel: An Old Testament evil spirit in the wilderness to whom a scapegoat was sent on the Day of Atonement
Attar also known as ittar is a natural perfume oil derived from botanical sources. Most commonly these oils are taken from the botanical material through hydro or steam distillation. In Ain-e-Akbari, Abul Fazal, has mentioned that Akbar used ittar daily and burnt incense sticks in gold and silver censers. A princess’s bath was incomplete without incense and ittar. A very popular ittar with the Mughal princes was ood, prepared in Assam.
Chesamukh: Name of a tiny village in Assam
Jambu Dweep; The ancient name for the Indian subcontinent
Sofura: ?

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And I surrender. This is one of the most difficult poems I’ve read in Assamese. I’m not sure if I’ve understood the nuances. This is mostly a line-by-line translation. And I’ve no clues who ‘Sofura’ is! 

Life

The man who stood
Near the roadside, asked,
Widening his eyes:
Hey, didn’t you die
In that dark evening, last Saturday?
Everybody said you did.

Did they? Let them
Whose eyes are shadowed by death
How will they see the new-blue horizon
Away from the cool touch of the mist?
Where would they store the living death of their eyes?

I died? That’s why you just
Saw me alive, animated.

In autumn’s clouded walk the grass that wither, dry up
Haven’t you heard their dying promise:
In the wave of the song of the cuckoo
We’ll dance again, in spring?

Scratch Mark of the Nail of these Words

On the bosoms of the tear-filled words
Which sprout from the silt
Thunder
A gust of cyclone
A forceful, inundated river.

Warmed by the sun’s enormous heat
These wisened words are
Like a pack of wolf
What fast, focused speed!

Somewhere or other
Some people
Clutching the sorrows of
The fertile, empty land
Search for these words.

In the light of the burning fire
Fleeing from the punishment of torture
Within the limits of our bodies
Still glitter
Scratch mark of the nail of these words.

The Snake

Unbearably beautiful in the rays of the golden sunlight
Like a static calm dream, a dazzling snake
Mysterious like fog, supple like a new-born babe
Unearthly the colour of its body.
In the rage of the broken dream, in every pore of its
Golden body the waves of throbbing life.
The sensation of motion on its body parts, on each of its movement
The way the night’s darkness follows the day
It pursues me.
Tiredness descends on each breathe of my runaway body;
In that moment bathed in death I’m exhausted
Its weird movements on the mouth of my life’s river
I feel it,
And it pulsates like the sea, pure like death
How intimate is this attraction!
As if I will melt and be done
In the embrace of its volcanic heat.
The fruitless rage of life suffers
In the flame of love and death
Alive, enchanted soul,
Strange is your reptile attraction,
Oh, the special one, fetch, fetch the flood of life!

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There is no way of knowing if Homen Borgohain and Mahendra Bora were influenced by each other while writing these two poems (see the earlier post), both titled, ‘The Snake.’ Not only the central imagery and style that are similar, even the choice of words, such as ‘dazzling golden snake’, and the ‘melting’ persona are remarkably similar.

However, there is a possibility that both may have been influenced by the 1923 D H Lawrence poem ‘Snake’.

The Snake

Oh, what an unbearably beautiful night, spreading warmth and heat!
My mind is excited (the mind with which I play)
As if a dazzling snake…
Golden is whose colour, the cruel emotion of death is whose eyes.
(How did this dream come true in our barren creation?)
I feel the unbearable happiness of freedom
In my being, in my consciousness; the uncontainable rhythm of life
In a serpentine motion, floating in the river of night’s darkness
Frantic, cyclonic, unbarred.
Like a lunatic, I adore this blood-bath darkness of the night
The way I love the mind, like tar the colour of whose body, a prostitute
In the forest of dreams, roams a dazzling golden snake
Surrounding it the golden silence, unbearable wonder and heat
Darkness and darkness.
I adore, like the night, fascinating, a snake, and its surprised pride,
Like tar the colour of whose body, a prostitute
Like a melting heart, this togetherness of death and beauty.

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About the poet
Seasoned journalist and editor, Homen Borgohain is also a major Assamese novelist and essay writer. He is known for his ability to speak on any subject on earth, and has been a popular columnist for several decades now. More Here.

In his autobiography, ‘Atmanusandhan’ (Investigation of the Self), Borgohain writers that he wrote this poem, ‘The Snake,’ in less than an hour while he was a student at Cotton College, Guwahati, to prove to his friends that it’s really easy to write a “modern poem.” Borgohain, however, refuses to divulge what the poem means. According to him, it doesn’t really mean anything.

The Sound Of The Broken Sleep

Either midday or midnight
On the other side of the river
Don’t know who calls out to whom
Na-re-sh-war.

You’d never know when and where suddenly
Plays the sound of the broken sleep. 

The Blue Letter

The sky bends over
The field of yellow mustard flowers
I feel as if
On the beak of the patmadoi bird
There’s a blue letter
As such that
It cannot fly away.  

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Patmadoi bird: The literal meaning of patmadoi is empress. It refers to a bird which has yellow feathers and queen-like regal bearing.