| Username |
Post |
| thaag |
Posted
on 02-May-03 08:29 PM
Surely, my friend, I am mad,
thats exactly what I am!
I see sounds,
hear sights,
I touch things thinner than air,
things whose existence the world denies,
things whose shapes the world does not know.
Stones I see as flowers,
pebbles have soft shapes,
water-smoothed at the waters edge
in the moonlight,
as havens sorceress smiles at me,
they put out leaves, they soften, they glimmer
and pulse, rising up like mute maniacs,
like flowers-a kind of innonbird flower.
I speak to them just as they speak to me,
in a language, my friend,
unwritten, unprinted, unspoken,
un-comprehended, unheard.
Their speech comes in ripples, my friend,
to the moonlit Gangas shore.
Surely, my friend, I am mad,
thats exactly what I am!
You are clever, and wordy
your calculations exact and correct forever,
but take one from one in my arithmetic,
and your are still left with one.
You use five senses, but I have six,
you have a brain, my friend,
but I have a heart.
To you a rose is a rose, and nothing more,
but I see Helen and Padmini,
you are forceful prose,
I am liquid poetry.
you freeze a I am melting,
you clear as I cloud over,
and then its the other way around.
Your world is solid, mine vapor,
your world is gross, mine subtle,
you consider a stone an object,
material hardness is your reality,
but I try to grasp hold of dreams,
just as you try to catch the rounded truths
of cold, sweet, graven coins.
My passion is that of a thorn, my friend,
yours is for gold and diamonds,
you say that the hills are deaf and dumb,
I say that they are eloquent.
Surely, my friend,
mine is a loose inebriation,
thats exactly how I am.
In the cold month of Magh I sat,
enjoying the first white warmth of the star
the world called me a drifter.
When they saw me staring blankly for seven days
after my return from the cremation ghats,
they said I was possessed.
When I saw the first frosts of time
in the hair of a beautiful woman,
I wept for three days,
the Buddha was touching my soul
but they said that I was raving!
When they saw me dance
of hearing the first cuckoo of spring
they called me a madman.
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| thaag |
Posted
on 02-May-03 08:43 PM
One dead-quite moon night
breathless I leapt to my feet,
filled with the pain of destruction.
On that occasion the fools
put me in the stocks,
One day I sang with the storm-
the wise men
sent me off to Ranchi.
Realizing that same day I myself would die
I stretched out on my bed.
A friend came along and pinched me hard
and said, Hey, madman,
your flesh isn't dead yet!
For years these things went on.
I'm crazy, friend-
that's just the way I am.
I called the Navab's wine blood,
the painted whore a corpse,
and the king a pauper.
I attacked Alexander with insults,
and denounced the so-called great souls.
The lowly I have raised on the bridge of praise
to the seventh heaven.
Your learned pandit is my great fool,
your heaven my hell,
your gold my iron,
friend! Your piety my sin.
Where you see yourself as brilliant
I find you a dolt.
Your rise, friend-my decline.
That's the way our values are mixed up,
friend!
Your whole world is a hair to me.
Oh yes, friend, I'm moonstruck through and through-
moonstruck!
That's just the way I am.
I see the blind man as the people's guide,
the ascetic in his cave a deserter;
those who act in the theater of lies
I see as dark buffoons.
Those who fail I find successful,
and progress only backsliding.
am I squint-eyed,
Or just crazy?
Friend, I'm crazy.
Look at the withered tongues of shameless leaders,
The dance of the whores
At breaking the backbone on the people's rights.
When the sparrow-headed newsprint spreads its black lies
In a web of falsehood
To challenge Reason-the hero in myself-
My cheeks turn red, friend,
red as molten coal.
When simple people drink dark poison with their ears
Thinking it nectar-
and right before my eyes, friend!-
then every hair on my body stands up stiff
as the Gorgon's serpent hair-
every hair on me maddened!
When I see the tiger daring to eat the deer, friend,
or the big fish the little,
then into my rotten bones there comes
the terrible strength of the soul of Dadhichi
and tries to speak, friend,
like the stormy day crashing down from heaven with the lightning.
When man regards a man
as not a man, friend,
then my teeth grind together, all thirty-two,
top and bottom jaws,
like the teeth if Bhimasena.
And then
red with rage my eyeballs rool
round and round, with one sweep
like a lashing flame
taking in this inhuman human world.
My organs leap out of theirs frames-
uproar! Uproar!
my breathing becomes a storm,
my face distorted, my brain on fire, friend!
with a fire like those that burn beneath the sea,
like the fire that devours the forests,
frenzied, friend!
as one who would swallow the wide world raw.
Oh yes, my friend,
the beautiful chakora am I,
destroyer of the ugly,
both tender and cruel,
the bird that steals the heaven's fire,
child of the tempest,
spew of the insane volcano,
terror incarnate.
Oh yes, friend,
my brain is whirling, whirling-
that's just the way I am.
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| DWI |
Posted
on 03-May-03 07:39 AM
Wow. I gather, thaag is Devkota.
Utterly refreshing, Bravo..hope to read more.
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| SITARA |
Posted
on 03-May-03 09:01 AM
Mad is a state of mind,
When you can't make sense,
Crazy is a state of being,
When They can't make sense.
I was luna struck,
They called me a lunatic,
I was sun-stroked,
They called me blinded!
Yes, I know
Crazy I am,
Making crazy sense,
In a lunatic world!
But,
That is just the way,
I like to be,
I like to be me!
:)
Thaag ji,
beautiful poem, eloquant...chitta bhujney! :)
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| PremPujari |
Posted
on 03-May-03 11:42 PM
Thaag, Isn't that Laxmi Prasad devkota's kabita??
hmmm.. sounds like he wrote it for me!!
:D
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