The Song

Bharat Majhi

Translator - Sailen Routray

Witold Szwedkowski, Concrete Poem, Title: 01, Year: 2018
In a Typographical Study by Bartek Smoczyński
Photo Credit - Wikimedia Commons/  Szwedkowski

These days you sing 

at almost every gathering,

and I follow you shamelessly.

I breathlessly drink your voice,

its shape, texture and tone, 

with an abandon

that sometimes shocks even me.

Perhaps you do not know,

that before I come 

to listen to you 

I take off

all the noise around me.

I find my way back 

after the abandon of your songs,

through my very own 

lost track to home.

These songs are enough to forget 

the history of your memories;

for the resolution of the defects 

in my horoscope.

They are as dense and close 

as the excitement of the claps

occasioned by your songs.

Even I had left home one day,

thinking that I too 

will learn to sing.

I really do not know how,

but I was back home

the next afternoon,

having caught 

the first train in the morning.

When I hear your songs these days,

it seems as if 

I am offering you a glass of chilled water,

after having glimpsed 

the bareness of your hands.

When I hear your songs these days,

it seems as if 

there is a staircase 

going up till the sky,

on which I am straining hard

to go and harvest the moon 

on a new moon night.

Thus, please keep on singing.

I am there, always,

Invisible, 

to frame the visions.

I keep on clapping shamelessly,

In the breathless abandon 

of the visions 

not induced by your songs.

Note: Bharat Majhi (born in 1972 in Kalahandi) works in an Odia language media house in Bhubaneswar. He has published nine volumes of poems in a poetic career spanning more than three decades. Amongst other recognitions, he has won the Bhubaneswar Book Fair Award in 2008 and the Sanskriti Award in 2004.