SOME MORE POEMS

Swarnjit Savi
Some Poems

Translation from Punjabi: Anil Kumar



Goodbye Mother!

Bidding you farewell on your final journey
Walking as I was with the four elements of your mortal remains
I was aware of your lifelong love
Every moment… every step.

And to painfully realize
That you’re going to return to five elements
I carried a water filled pitcher and completed the ritual walk around your body
The sound of the smashing pitcher
And the splashing water
Reminded me how on the day of my marriage
You’d in immense joy
Drunk the ritual water after waving it
Round my head several times.

On the snug chest where you’d always held me secure
I was placing
Heavy logs of wood and tree stumps
And while lighting your funeral pyre
I reasoned with my trembling hands
That I was the eldest son of my mother
And that I needed to be brave.

Consuming flames, which forced others away,
Continued to radiate to me
The coziness of your lap
And the shade of your body wrap.

And next morning
As I was gleaning and gathering your mortal remains
And putting them in an earthen bowl
To wash them in milk
You continued to linger on in my mind—
A young woman dumping basketfuls of soil
To fill the pit of a plot:
Your eyes full of dreams
And your hardened bones
And your dogged insistence
That you’d set everything right.

My hands stumbled upon a portion of your skull
And your sisters and sisters-in-law, my aunts, and your daughters, my sisters-- all averred
“Look at the writ of Mother Destiny
How incomprehensible it is like
The green coloured graph
On the oxygen monitor in a hospital!
That’s why in all your life
You’d experienced happiness for a fleeting while
And during the rest of it your silent eyes
Were filled with gloom.

How niggardly
Had Mother Destiny
Credited happiness in your account—
A scant moment of joy
For millions of moments of pain!
How mountains of grief
Mother Destiny kept raising for you!

Now here I sit
In the swift current of Ganga
With all that is left of your life
A few handfuls of bones not more than a couple of kilos.

Have got entered
In the ledger of the priest
Your name
Along with the names of generations gone by.

The priest has told me
How and when
Our ancestors came there
At Har Ki Pauri—the ladder to Eternity.

One handful after another
I’m immersing your ashes
In the swirling waters at Har Ki Pauri
And the priest remarks
“In forty-eight hours flat
These bones will turn into grains of sand
And will be washed away by Goddess Ganga’s
Blissful waters.”

And I find myself brooding:
I can hold you in my hands only a few moments more
And God knows where you’ll be thereafter
Perhaps you’d go on to join
The long line of stars
Twinkling since times immemorial.

Not you
But a sense of you will remain
After these bones
Have slipped out of my hands.
That’s all I’d be left with!




Nanaka
(Mother’s Family)

On crossing the narrow path
To mother’s ancestral village
Kids, elders, youth and contemporaries all
Turn into uncles, aunts, grannies and grandpas.

First of all on the screen of mind
Appears mother’s mother
My grumpy granny
A treasure trove of joys.

Happy, playful
Chasing us with a stick in her hands
Or showering her love on us
And feeding us with butter-soaked jaggery sugar.

And then there were
My grandpa and Uncle Atma
Every time you saw them,
You’d notice Grandpa pulling out pieces of red-hot iron
With pincers and placing them on the anvil
For Uncle to beat, cut or forge them with a hammer
Wreaking vengeance on them blocked
God knows since when.

And then fashioning
Sometimes a ploughshare
Sometimes a sickle
Or a disc for a hot plate
Or a chisel
And umpteen other things the two kept shaping.

Granda would double up as a doctor too.
Should someone come with an aching tooth
Grandpa would put his pliers in his mouth
And out came whatever was painful—canines and molars
No ah…no ouch!
The patient would look in awe at
The decayed tooth lying on his palm
And get up and depart.
Grandpa departed one day just like that.

At times in front of blazing red flames
With his face aglow would sit my Uncle—mother’s brother
Beating, cutting, forging iron.
Seeing him at work people would say
“Hot iron just cringes before Atma
Just like a goat in front of a butcher.”
And Uncle would say
“The welding that Atma does is as smooth as cheeks.
Let your tongue roll all over the tractor trailer
And not a spec would prick it.
And just like that
A day after he had wailed in mourning
At the last prayer for his dead niece
He passed away at his village
Without a prick.

And left behind him the legend—
“In front of Atma iron would wail
And work would go into hiding in scare.”
…………………




River
1-

How impetuous is the river!
Caressing stones
Rubbing them
Roaring
Leaving on them
A mark of
Her gushing waters
Combing the rounded head of stones
To make them smooth as wax.

Stones do get impacted by
The fathomless love of droplets
If not a drop itself.
……………….



2-


Audacious river
Carrying away
Everything in her blind fury
But stones
Keep locking horns like bulls
Jibing, baulking and thwarting

Roaring
Ripping
Flipping
The surging course of the audacious river.

…………….

3-


The unceasing fall of water drops
And the moist life
Have on stones
Grown verdant moss
And blossomed tiny leaves
-Refreshingly green.
Are these merely stones?
………….


Mother River

You…
How eager were you
To offer all that’s yours
To jungles, trees
Flora and fauna!
And we your sons good and bad
First add poison
To your water
And then to drink it
Purify it again
Water that was
An elixir before.




Mountain Dweller

Lofty peaks
And raring to reach them
The tortuous paths
Full of uneven scattered stones

And we set out
Carrying sticks for support
Breathless, suffering cramps
Stumbling and staggering

And wondering
Who would reach the top first
And planning to reward
The ones who would.

We hugged and patted in appreciation
All the kids and youth
Who had reached the top first.

Watching this celebration of victory
Was the one
Who had guided our path
He who, with the burden of our luggage on his back,
Had reached ahead of us all—
The tenacious mountain dweller.

…………………..
Clossal..!!!

Clossal..!!!
How deep it pierces into your being
This word.

Viewed through the window of the moving car
The stony torso of a mountain
Seems to have neither beginning nor end.
Running all along the tortuous road
Like a dreadful giant.
On getting down I notice
Another peak beside that mountain
Milky white
Shining like a plume
On the forehead of
The mammoth mountain.


Mother

Mother
Now that Mother
Has entered the pages of the ledger of death at Haridwar
Along side the names of her in-laws’ ancestors
Father lets out a wailing cry

And for atrocities hurled on her
Seeks pardon over and over again
And bemoans the loss of his Sultanate.
Earth like Mother
Where Father sowed neither love nor intimacy
Just command.

Mother who
In times of want and penury
Slogged shoulder to shoulder with Father
Put together her nest straw by straw
Filled the pit of a plot deep like a well
With basketfuls of soil she carried herself
And built her home.

Mother—Earth like Mother
Who had never whined
While bearing children
Or rearing them
But was always up and doing
Pruning and preening.

Mother raised husband’s younger brother like a son
And finding his elder brother’s nest empty
Placed two of her children in his lap
And filled with happiness his desolate home.

Mother
Who took in her stride
Every time Father tilted in favour of
His brothers and sister
Carried out chores for them
Only to bear the brunt of his rebuffs.

Mother
Sometimes she tolerated Father’s highhandedness
And sometimes the waywardness of her progeny
But kept the doors of her patience tightly shut
Never raising her voice.
Not her words
Only her sobs did the walls ever hear
Walls with whom she would converse in loneliness

“My husband slogged like anything
Day after day and night on night
I do agree
But I work twice as much
Tell me for what fault of mine
Everything I do becomes worthless
In comparison to what he does?”

Father who now wails in grief
Has been left all alone
All his life he had just commanded and had his way.
Now the pride of his authority
Lies shattered in tears.