The fear of poetry

There are many such poems 
Which have not been written yet
By me or anyone else

Several poems hushed
Like a seed inside the earth
Asleep in the womb
Keeping alive inside itself
For a long time
A bristling offering

Neither I nor anyone else
Knows with certainty
If we will be able to ever write 
All these unborn poems

Honestly speaking
More than anything else
What is most frightening
Is the fear of poetry

Even I am unable to say 
At this moment
Why I am afraid of
That which is unexpressed
And suppose
If I conquer my fear
And write all those poems
Then it will certainly destabilize you
Because more than anything else
What is most frightening
Is the fear of poetry!

***

Forest

You were not there

I have ploughed through
An endless forest
And now 
In the centre
Once again
You are not here

These silent trees 
are waiting
Needlessly
Carrying on them
A deathly denseness

The sweet fragrance of
Ripe fallen fruit
Is nestling in the air
Like stories told years ago

I will not wait anymore
For any miracle

I have started
to have deep faith
In this forest

***

Performance

As I am glued to 
the performance
of living
I am trying to write
A script that will
Not fit into the frame.

While it seems like
I am near the end of
The dark tunnel
It is still quite far
A hallucinating light
Dangles like a Mirage
My back is darkness
And so are my eyes
This is neither day
Nor a proper night
In the ambiguity of
This twilight
Cold fingers of death 
Are slowly passing over
This hazy existence
And yet the feet continue to tread
Head lowered as if slaves of life
Like others one 
accompanies the road
As if a scapegoat of life
Devoid of energy or madness
One is unable to emulate 
any eccentric example

Trying to solve the burning triad of
The loss of time, space and memory
Don't make the mistake of looking for me
In any event or in the character
from a story
In this humungous zero
While whirling at zero speed
Perhaps I will be found
In the hidden meaning 
Of a metaphor or a myth

I am striving to write
A script that will not fit
Into the frame
But please don't make the mistake
Of reading me
In my lines
Perhaps I will be found
In the infinite empty spaces
Between the lines

If you stumble
While reading such an empty space
It will be enough
For me…

***

A nonstart

It is true that we would like to
Eagerly free ourself 
Of this, all this innate
Business of living
And also of the barren
Doodles on paper.
There is no wish to 
establish any definition 
or construct any theory.
We just want to lie still,
Inert in one place
So that those leaden demons
Clutching the insides,
With a sense of hereditary sorrow
Will leave us
one after another.
And we will become light,
So light as if we are a tiny dot
That can fit through
the eye of a needle.

That 
What we were
Before we took root
In our mother's womb,
Soulless.

***
Image Credit: Katayama Bokoyu
 A Note on Translation: What makes translation an experience that I deeply enjoy is the fact that it goes one step beyond reading and relishing literature. While working on a translation, one not only reads and analyses the work, but one gets under the skin of the text, breaks the bones of language and meets the core of the work, irrespective of the author. In fact, the author fades from view and the work becomes one's own. It is really about sinking one's teeth into the text and reading it fully, completely. The beauty of translation is also experienced in the way it shifts cultures, literary traditions and canons when it moves from one language to the other. That is why, to be able to read the translation purely in the linguistic culture that it has embraced, becomes significant while reading the new-minted work. The four poems by Suchita Khallal that I have translated here resonated with me and travelled with me into my psyche and my own understanding of the world in which they were born. Words transformed themselves and accepted a new rhythm, took on other depths of meaning that come with another language, and found new references and connections. It is the thrill of re-creation and the satisfaction of re-reading that turned the process into something cherishable. What stayed with me was the depth of meaning that the work had, that was what allowed the translations to go beyond mere transliteration. - Rahee Dahake