Lover

Ramakanta Samantaray

Translated by Sailen Routray

 Sculpture titled 'Red Dragon' from 1985 during River Lee flooding (2023)
Artist: Jim Buckley (b. 1957)
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons/Podstawko

Nothing could be made

while I kept on saying,

I'll make, I 'll make.

Always

a soft, deformed shape

of half made legs, of half made hands

arose and stood in front of oneself.

The magic ended 

in a sticky blackness

no matter how shiny

were the colours one daubed. 

One had to come back

with the hope that

someone someday will get it.

And it was impossible to return.

Now I hear

that no one understood anything.

Someone has created

 a god out of that half-made shape.

And someone else 

has opened the sanctum sanctorum

and is looking for the missing sculptor in earnest.

Note: The Odia original of this translated poem is sourced from the poetry collection 'Patha Asaranti', published in 2005 by Athena Books (Brahmapur). The poet Ramakanta Samantaray, born in 1972, has studied painting at the Bibhuti Kanungo College of Art and Craft (Bhubaneswar), and Odia Literature and Language at the Utkal University (Bhubaneswar). His doctoral work was a meditation on contemporary theatre in Odia. With this combination of literature, language, and the visual arts, he has been constantly working to create hybrid narratives. Apart from being a painter, he has also published fifteen books, including collections of poems and short stories, and novels. He has written and published articles on art, artists, and monographs in Odia. He presently lives and works in Bhubaneswar.