Translated from the Hindi by Sejal Arora
Otherwise I’ll Lose My Way
Behind the bushes
The cricket ball is still rolling
Steam still rises from the food served
Someone scolds me from years away
To return home and wash up and eat
the sun hasn’t gone down yet
Incomplete still the game of seven stones
Lightless still the evening lantern
I will run as soon as the whistle blows
I will search for everyone, one by one,
Who are hidden somewhere here, behind these walls, doors and trees
to spring a sudden strike
My kite is wobbling through the waft of train’s soot
Its string
Pierces my finger
Drops of blood, like dew, are falling in the future
I will return home now
I will wash up, eat and complete my homework,
Math and the world, and writing essays.
I will empty the inkpot on my pyjamas,
In my notebook, still, worlds large and small,
album of colourful stamps
Beyond the hills
A shepherd is flocking its herd
I am the one,
the last one, left behind, gone, wavering
the tiniest, whitest lamb
recognize me
Else, I fear I’ll lose my way.
Sentences to be Completed
Our sentences will be complete
Sometime in the future,
One day
When things shall exist beyond us
Only nature and sunlight will persist
Across the deserted Earth wide
These sentences will be gilding
And echoing
They will be complete in the future someday
And in their end
Countless trees will sway
Like countless full stops1.
Note:
1. The graphic reference adduced by the poet is that of a full stop (poorna viram) signified by a vertical slash (|) in the Devanagari script. Thus, the imagery of swaying trees against the vertical full stops.
Statistics in a Hurried Flawed Poem
It takes two minutes to write a sentence in a poem,
In that time, forty thousand children may have died,
Mostly in the third world,
From hunger and disease.
A hurried, flawed rush of ten lines in a poem usually takes
Between twenty, twenty-five minutes,
In that time, four to five lakh children might have vanished,
Into the jaws of death.
May the poem be so powerful,
That poets and critics alike refrain from calling it a poem,
Or prepare many drafts of it,
Until then, crores of children,
Thousands or lakhs of women and citizens,
Have perished faultlessly in this universe.
Hence, beneath the seemingly complete poem,
There lies an even larger graveyard.
The bigger the graveyard,
The greater the poet and the nation.
Uday Prakash (born 1952) is a Hindi poet, scholar, journalist, translator and short story writer. He has worked as administrator, editor, researcher, and TV director. He writes for major dailies and periodicals as a freelancer. He has also received several awards for his collection of short stories and poems. With Mohan Das he received Sahitya Akademi Award in 2011. He returned his Sahitya Akademi award in 2015 as a protest against the killing of M. M. Kalburgi that initiated a storm of national protests by writers, artists, scholars and intellectuals.
Sejal Arora (she/her). Student. Mostly at a loss for words. Hence.