Buddhadeva Bose

This is leisure, and you, its muted breeze.

Not a couple of hour's idling, or watching the Gourisringa
                          from a warm terrace;
Neither the gentle crumbling away of an eloquent dusk,
Nor the repose of tired nerves.

It is to feel time stretch into infinity,
To feel that there never can be death.
As if, all that lies hidden beneath the stream of flow,
All that is lost with the dying away,---
      Of the crowds of people on the sidewalks,
      The faint attempts at speech by the neighbouring animals
      The foolish grin of the flower in the pot---
Come back gently, take form, regain life;
All together--- the scarlet flowers, the secret worms,
And all that which is impossible.

Like one who has left the familiar behind for the first time,
he trembles:
And then with a sudden roar
      immense and black,---
           pulling
              wrenching away
                  from the earth,
The jet escapes into the heart of an endless night,
Into a nameless area bordering the conscious---
He sees then:
Which within the known had escaped imagination---
Lights, vehicles, buildings, ships in the harbour,
The city suddenly exposed in its entirety;
And then only the night, the space, and a few stars remain;
Fears vanish, tears sink within;
On the silent mind's easel of wakeful slumbers
appear---
All that he has left behind---all of it,
All that is yet to come--all of it,
Bound by a single moment.

This then is leisure. You, its frozen rhapsody.

Translated by Nandini Gupta [nandinI gupta*] - Nandini Gupta is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands, working on ... (more)

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