Poetry

Reuters photo

By

Madhabi Das

Secret Love

You tutored me the way to learn

acquired all you gave

Like Nature’s tacit lesson

O my secret love …

Fostering you in my bosom

At every bit

of morose survival

Look there in the cloudy sky

A floweret beckons, sunbeams

In the hold

It’s not spring yet, everywhere round

A gala of leaf-shedding

Before the golden grains disappear

A small boat is expected

Twilight descends

in the guise of home-coming birds

night nudges the mundane

the golden grain is in search of

some other source of light

darkness swallows …

the night downs

O my secret love

Be you so

Let me light up

Greeting

Couldn’t reach you yet

My journey began since Aryans’

Svapnavasavadattam* had not been scripted

… by then

They have advanced too far

Who started after me

Greet you all …

In the deep down eyes

Couldn’t preserve hopes in galore

Had I not been

Left alone …

* Svapnavasavadattam is a Sanskrit play in six acts written by the ancient Indian poet Bhasa.

Both poems translated into English by Subhasree Chatterjee

Madhabi Das

Poet Madhabi Das, a teacher of Bengali language and literature, hails from Cooch Behar, West Bengal. She lives in poetry and engages herself in a scholastic study of poets, their lives and poetics. Regularly published in little magazines and journals, both online and printed, she has to her credit some standard publications in Bangladesh. She even had the nicer experience of being a publisher of a reputed magazine, Gollachoot. Madhabi, on a regular interval, is published with her invited book reviews in north Bengal based newspapers like, Uttarbanga Patrika, and Uttarer Saradin.

‘Ajagbaha Barna’ is her debut collection of Bengali poems.