Krishna Kalpit
Vishwa Hindi Sammelan
The language in which we wail
And shed tears
They ride on it
And fly up above those clouds
One says I did not go
Let me be counted among the tyagis
Another says I did manage to
Let me be regarded among the bhaagis
One was tossing down the list-of-contents from the sky
In the parched fields of Hindi-Patti
A latest Hindi sheikh
Had set up a harem of government committees
Exiting one
To enter the other
Someone was being wrecked at principal
The other at interest and the third in etiquette
One was screaming: All life insult has been my lot
Now let some honour be conferred on me too
One was saying: Let me be given all the dough
Into dollars shall I transcreate them
The other said, no, I am the only one to play
The unattainable veena
An imperialist
Was busy garlanding a communalist
A woman, with the blood of the guiltless
Went on signing strange advertisements
A freakish soiree, this
A piffling singer
Was singing obscene bhajans
An editor was looking for
Repose at the shoes
Of the foreign minister
A reporter, in a Shastri-Bhavan drawer
Fixed his permanent address
One used to say I shall breathe my last in Italia
One wished to be irrelevant in Spanish
One would play hide and seek
With an almost dead language
One was sulking
One was being sweet-talked
One professor
At Jawaharlal Nehru University
Harlequin, ludicrous
Spewing commentaries on Muktibodh
One deadbody
Was glued to the wings of the British Airways
The other
Had already chaired every
Literary Circle, every Goshti of the future
One soul had entered
Next year’s every representative body
A perplexing tableaux of globalization this
In some strange brothel in Soho
Someone was hoisting the Hindi langot
And in the distant East
In some dry, grainy desert village
In a language in which the child stammered
That used to be called Hindi
Wherefore all righteous opposition?
Shall only beggars of the future
Barter and transact in this great language?
A poet of this language
Cuts into two his liver and regrets
Chisels on with his poetry
Tearing off page after page after page…
—————–
Tale of the Bicycle
More humane than a human
Is traipsing travelling hope
A possibility, standstill
The supple fingers of a flying kite
The limber legs, their unwritten tale
One can pick-out from the shadow of that kite
Ganesh on mooshik
Shivji on bayl
Durga on sinh
Kartik on mayur
Indra on hathi
Saraswati on hans
Lakshmi on ullu
Yamraj on bhaisa
Mahajan in BMW
President in airplane
Mullah Nasiruddin on donkey
Crowd in a train
But on a bicycle, every single time a human being
A workman—weary, spent
A school going kid
Or in the streets of Patna
The wife of jankavi Laldhuyan
Tied up sewing-machine on the carrier
Cycle is the only conveyance in this wide world
Which is not a vahan of any God
There cannot be any memorial song for the cycle
It is the only machine running towards life
The oldest friendship between humans and machines
Made into poetry by the Punjabi poet Amarjit Chandan
And Vittoria De Sica enacted it in his film
Through the dank and tortuous alleyways of poverty, pain and humiliation
Where human beings live
Till that point, only cycles can ply
From the site of the event, one cannot come to the conclusion
That the cycle was used against humanity
When dead-bodies were removed and gunpowder-smoke cleared itself
The glistening twin wheels of the cycle lay
Right at the centre of the road
The bell cast far away, adrift
And that tiffin-carrier, in which—bomb not roti,
That disappeared mischievously
Till the end: the story of a bicycle
Is the story of a man
——————–
The poems first appeared in tirchhispelling.wordpress.com
Translation: HUG
