Three Countries

 Bharat Majhi

Translated by Sailen Routray

District Museum Bhawanipatna
Photo Credit: commons.wikimedia.org/ Debasish Rout

America

Look at that open mouth.
A tongue, or is it a road 
quivering with desire?
This tongue is littered 
with the footsteps of many countries.
No turns.
The dangers, if any,
are quite slippery.

Iraq

Still the doors are ajar.

The sun returning
to prove its tiredness;
someone pretending to be himself
not returning from the clammy backyard of his past;
the severed heads of our tears
held together by torn stoles, 
slipping away.

Despite our misplaced penances,
the roads are unmovable,
and
the doors are still 
ajar.

Bharat

I sent myself
to trail every passing visitor,
and, then, I sat like a shadow at home.

I listened to whatever he had to say,
and having turned the visitors away,
I started telling stories, 
after having turned into a shadow.
He cried, 
and then my shadow cried.
He laughed, 
and, so did my shadow.

He left after a few days.
Now this house is full of shadows.
He has not returned yet. 

Note: The poet, 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.