You don't know (A poem by Pash)

 Translated from Punjabi by Rajesh Sharma

you don’t know

how I’m counted in poetry:

like some carcass-eating dog

that has strayed into a full-blown mujra

 

perhaps you wonder

what I write late into the nights

in the light of a lamp

for some party engaged in dangerous things

 

you don’t know how I go to poetry:

like a rustic woman

in new clothes of outworn fashion

who steps, bewildered, into city shops

 

I ask of poetry

nail polish for you

coloured embroidery thread

for my younger sister

bitter medicine

to treat father’s cataract

 

poetry sees mischief in such demands

 

every month

night after night

it sends for me its sentinels

carrying batons of cane

and guns with polished butts

they take away my beloved books

my childhood picture from the shelf

and my first love’s cry

that slipped on the stairs

and, hurt, was broken

into a disconsolate rainbow

 

you don’t know

that the policemen who know me

act like strangers

and a searching paw barbaric

falls on pledges I had made

to nights of the moon

 

you don’t know

how the spine’s old wound twitches with pain

after they leave

 

you don’t know

what that dangerous party does

you don’t know that a sleepless testament of love

flails about on the sleeping earth

a legacy of standing up bare-chested

against the wind’s relentless tearing

 

men are like weapons there

and weapons are like men

but to tell the truth

they are not men

nor weapons

the sound there is

more than of weapons

of friendship snapping

between men

people there are like sand

on a trail

leading to a far-away well on which

in some bygone age

women carrying meals for their men

working in the fields

might have hoped for a road to be laid

but the man behind the tractor’s wheel

going down the road

wouldn’t know the women

wouldn’t know of the sand 

spread under the tar

they want bicycles

and anything but bread to eat

or tea with death’s features

and I have nothing

except poetry that is like milkweed
a mango not meant for sucking

 

you don’t know I come running

like a beaten jackal

from a foreign paper’s editor

his palms had no hard skin

his hands were velvet-soft

like cattle’s nose-ring licked smooth

the trimmed beard keen to pierce

like a red-hot rod

my eyes

dream-filled like freedom’s virgin dawn

in his bags were rolls

of folded clouds

and in his camera

a stinking pool of jaggery

I’d seen in his Fiat’s boot

my little clay pot of marbles I had lost

in childhood

but whenever I held out my hand

to shake his

now the Health Minister coughed

now Haryana’s IG cleared his throat

 

you don’t know

how hard it was to bring myself back to you

intact

safe against his tempting promises

that like pythons hissed

the promises of his apolitical politics

when that editor

and thousands like him come riding

their coarse bodies

the green luminescence dies

in the grass along pathways

these people are moths

flying to the light

they rise in blasts of revulsion

into the nostrils of children

who are like lamps

 

my words want to be the oil

burning in those lamps

 

I know no better use for poetry

 

and you

you don’t know

how I’m counted among poets