Divorce 3

It’s not easy
to be alone
other people
have impatient
waiting-room eyes.
The floor pulls
your steps out from
under you.
You swing yourself
from hour
to hour.
A vocabulary
of about
one hundred words
was not included
when the property
was divided.

The longing for
discomfort
the lack of
strong smells.
Stale smoke
in the curtains.
The bed is
now too wide.
Girlfriends leave
when the potatoes
need boiling.

Freedom
won’t come
until the next train
an unknown
passenger
who does not
like children.
The dog is
restless
sniffs at
the wrong trouser legs
will soon be
in heat.

You read
books
watch TV
register
nothing
are suddenly
ecstatic
in the morning
and miserable
by nightfall.

It’s a phase
girlfriends say
something you have
to get through.
Weightless as an
astronaut
you float around
in empty rooms
and wait
for the freedom
to do
what you
no longer
want to.

-Tove Ditlevsen, translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell, from The Paris Review Issue 238, Winter 2021

Banalata Sen

I have walked earth’s byways

for millennia

from Ceylon’s coast

to the archipelago of Malaya,

in the night’s darkness,

moving ever.

I have been a guest

at the now hoary court

of Vimvisar

and Asoka;

in the further dark

of the city of Vidharva.

Life’s seas foamed

all around. I was weary

And my sole respite came,

when

I spent a couple of hours

with Natore’s Banalata Sen.

Her hair dark, like some long gone

Vidisha’s night,

her face like Sravasti’s delicate

handiwork

Like some mariner,

helm lost, gone astray

in far seas,

by chance discovering

the greenness

of Spice Islands—

I saw her in the dusk.

And raising eyes, like bird’s nests,

she asked: ‘Where were you

so long?’

She asked me then

Natore’s Banalata Sen.

Evening comes at all our day’s end

like the sound of dew,

The kite wipes off sunshine’s scent

from its wings.

When all the earth’s colours are spent,

in the fireflies’ brilliant hue,

completing an unfinished tale,

an old script

finds a new arrangement.

All the birds return home,

all the rivers.

All the day’s transactions end.

Just darkness remains

and sitting with me

face to face,

Banalata Sen.

—Jibanananda Das, translated from Bangla by Ron. D.K. Banerjee; from ‘Signatures One Hundred Indian Poets’ edited by K Satchidanandan; National Book Trust, India 2000

The More-Mother (La mamadre)

My more-mother comes by 

in her wooden shoes. Last night

the wind blew from the pole, the roof tiles

broke, and walls 

and bridges fell.

The pumas of night howled all night long, 

and now, in the morning 

of icy sun, she comes, 

my more-mother, Dona 

Trinidad Marverde,

soft as the tentative freshness 

of the sun in storm country, 

a frail lamp, self-effacing, 

lighting up

to show others the way.

Dear more-mother—

I was never able 

to say stepmother!—

at this moment

my mouth trembles to define you, 

for hardly

had I begun to understand

than I saw goodness in poor dark clothes, 

a practical sanctity—

goodness of water and flour,

that's what you were. Life made you into bread, 

and there we fed on you, 

long winter to forlorn winter 

with raindrops leaking 

inside the house, 

and you,

ever present in your humility, 

sifting 

the bitter 

grain-seed of poverty 

as if you were engaged in 

sharing out

a river of diamonds.

Oh, mother, how could I 

not go on remembering you 

in every living minute?

Impossible. I carry

your Marverde in my blood,

surname

of the shared bread, 

of those gentle hands

which shaped from a flour sack 

my childhood clothes,

of the one who cooked, ironed, washed, 

planted, soothed fevers, 

and when everything was done 

and I at last was able 

to stand on my own sure feet, 

she went off, fulfilled, dark, 

off in her small coffin

Where for once she was idle

under the hard rain of Temuco.

—Pablo Neruda, The More-Mother/ La mamadre, from Where the Rain Is Born/ Donde nace la lluvia from the collection Isla Negra translated by Alastair Reid, Rupa & Co. 2005

Those that will never come to my home

Those that will never come to my home

I shall go to meet.

A river in flood will never come to my home.

To meet a river, like people,

I shall go to the river, swim a little, and drown.

Dunes, rocks, a mountain, a pond, endless trees, fields

will never come to my home.

I shall search high and low

for dunes, mountains, rocks—like people.

People who work all the time,

I shall meet, not during my leisure hours,

but as if it was an important job.

This first wish of mine I’ll hold on to,

like the very last one.

—Vinod Kumar Shukla,

‘Jo Mere Ghar Kabhi Nahi Ayenge’: translated by, Dilip Chitre/Daniel Weissbort

The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters

The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters

and the diameter of its effective

range — about seven meters.

And in it four dead and eleven wounded.

And around them in a greater circle

of pain and time are scattered

two hospitals and one cemetery.

But the young woman who was

buried where she came from

over a hundred kilometers away

enlarges the circle greatly.

And the lone man who weeps over her death

in a far corner of a distant country

includes the whole world in the circle.

And I won’t speak at all about the crying of the orphans

that reaches to the seat of God

and from there onward, making

the circle without end and without God.

— Yehuda Amichai, ‘Time’ published by Oxford University Press

What is Tamara Saying with the Milk Bottle’s Nipple in her Mouth?

Only this:

Let no one harass the kitten

let none shoot down

bear-cubs in the forest

let not birch trees wither

hit by ammunition

let everybody on this earth

live as friends

let death return

the ones it has taken away

let there be no earthquake

let all aeroplanes land safely

let my father complete his poem

let all fathers become poets.

-Izet Sarajlic. (Adapted by Sitakant Mahapatra, from a translation by Marilyn Sjoberg.)