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Gedicht

Varavara Rao

The Other Day

Not that my coming is without intimation
What needs be said always remains unsaid
Not an unanticipated occurrence
But yearning for the propitious in the unintended

No word chain disrupted
No effort aborted
And each experience . . . halfway

Yet that is not the problem
Time has not come to a standstill
There
Time has simply
Uncoupled us

Our sleepless wait
Altering the date
Was to efface
The bittersweet divides.

Our cuddle,
The nestle of twenty springs
Snuggled in the nest of feathers
Dissolving in the bitter actual . . .

Even as you say, alas,
Will they take you away tomorrow?
It’s already the day
Today

Distraught
Even as you agitate in agony
Alas, do they already take you
Even while you look on
I am shackled

The scene,
Arrested word
Like the broken tear
Slashed through the
Squares and rectangles
Of the gratings at
Our counter meetings.
I can only pityingly
Stare.
The escort van roars
And stirs up dust.

Something smells
As I turn my view inside
Rifles and Khaki uniforms do
The surveillance.

My self writhes
I am agitated
As the petrol smells,
My wailing entrails move
I turn in
My view from you
In the outer world
Towards you
In the inner world.
Time and I have only two limbs
Day and night
With the desire to work a bit faster
Time grasping its arrow-seconds
Me clasping my quill
Move on
And go on moving.

The enemy has four legs
Tele-ear, tele-gaze, radio-mouth
And armed palms.

Above all,
The rapacity to live on
All alone.

It is for this
He annihilated his heart,
For this he smothers its vibrations.

In what discourse
Can we converse
With the heartless?

Bloodhound’s gasping tongue
His neck-strap,
The whip in the prodding master’s hand,
He assumes, from his rank.
What language can translate the utterance
That it’s felony to shackle reflections?

Property
Fractures the human world
Into custodians and criminals
But when I assert and declare
Banishment of the very thing
Property’s cage turns me a defendant, all right,
But,
For the overlord’s eyes
I am a Communist
And
As if nothing can surpass it
He arraigns me as a
Naxalite

Let us persist to actualize it exactly
Let us perpetuate ‘treason’
For the purpose of multitudes

THE OTHER DAY

Varavara Rao

Varavara Rao

(India, 1940)

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THE OTHER DAY

The Other Day

Not that my coming is without intimation
What needs be said always remains unsaid
Not an unanticipated occurrence
But yearning for the propitious in the unintended

No word chain disrupted
No effort aborted
And each experience . . . halfway

Yet that is not the problem
Time has not come to a standstill
There
Time has simply
Uncoupled us

Our sleepless wait
Altering the date
Was to efface
The bittersweet divides.

Our cuddle,
The nestle of twenty springs
Snuggled in the nest of feathers
Dissolving in the bitter actual . . .

Even as you say, alas,
Will they take you away tomorrow?
It’s already the day
Today

Distraught
Even as you agitate in agony
Alas, do they already take you
Even while you look on
I am shackled

The scene,
Arrested word
Like the broken tear
Slashed through the
Squares and rectangles
Of the gratings at
Our counter meetings.
I can only pityingly
Stare.
The escort van roars
And stirs up dust.

Something smells
As I turn my view inside
Rifles and Khaki uniforms do
The surveillance.

My self writhes
I am agitated
As the petrol smells,
My wailing entrails move
I turn in
My view from you
In the outer world
Towards you
In the inner world.
Time and I have only two limbs
Day and night
With the desire to work a bit faster
Time grasping its arrow-seconds
Me clasping my quill
Move on
And go on moving.

The enemy has four legs
Tele-ear, tele-gaze, radio-mouth
And armed palms.

Above all,
The rapacity to live on
All alone.

It is for this
He annihilated his heart,
For this he smothers its vibrations.

In what discourse
Can we converse
With the heartless?

Bloodhound’s gasping tongue
His neck-strap,
The whip in the prodding master’s hand,
He assumes, from his rank.
What language can translate the utterance
That it’s felony to shackle reflections?

Property
Fractures the human world
Into custodians and criminals
But when I assert and declare
Banishment of the very thing
Property’s cage turns me a defendant, all right,
But,
For the overlord’s eyes
I am a Communist
And
As if nothing can surpass it
He arraigns me as a
Naxalite

Let us persist to actualize it exactly
Let us perpetuate ‘treason’
For the purpose of multitudes
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