Love Song
From the winter trees
leaves fall to the ground.
When you walk over
these dry leaves a music escalates…
Sa-re-ga-ma
Pa-da-ni-sa
Watch these dry leaves,
these are corpses of a symphony…
From the leaves
of the burning rose you gave me
shall one day rise
this clear dawn of my dreams.
Lighting a candle
on some restaurant’s table
we are reading
ageless tales of the moon and the bird.
Drenched
in the ecstasy of our warm bodies
we spread out
and dry our dreams
full of vacant
riverbeds of our eyes.
Just today I heard
in the night of the festival of love
a moon-bird
committed suicide.
Once again the blood
wrote the story of the moon
and the lovers celebrated
a night of success
and shot into
the crimson skies
white-winged pigeons
in the name of the bleeding moon.
Translated from the Nepali by Yuyutsu Sharma
Hunger Dreams
In the remote mountain villages
little children are playing
in the dust of the famished streets.
And uninterrupted
in the vivid mirrors
of their eyes are dancing
stunning sequences of a beautiful hunger.
More than hunger
of a loaf of bread
an ache of a sweet hunger of dreams
keeps kicking in their sleep.
Hunger after hunger
lined up, piled up, accumulated
and put on display
in the weekly hillside Haat-bazaars
of children’s precious dreams.
Restless, impetuous,
wanting to free themselves
they seem to leap
into the sweet hunger of dreams.
In the green eye of the distant mountains
with their soft lead pencils
they are drawing
abstract pictures of a sweet hunger.
They are engaged in forgetting
their true selves in the sweet hunger of dreams.
All year long in the blue eyes
of these children I keep reading
a lasting harvest
of a sweet hunger of dreams.
Translated from the Nepali by Yuyutsu Sharma