If You Never Come Again

Painting by Laurie Mitchell

If you never come again

If you never come again, never blow
through these steaming regions
like cooling drifts of the upper air,
even that absence is an encounter.
Your absense is as of the blue rose
from the kingdom of flowers.
Who knows, some day
you may yet appear. Maybe you have,
only you are too close.
Can I smell my own hair?
Marvellous sights have been seen.
A full moon was to have risen last night --
only a quivering sickle appeared!
It was an eclipse.

I have given up strewing grain on the ground
to have the birds join me at lunch.
Only when the baby is cut adrift
does it have its free hunger and thirst;
like taking off a blindfold
to be confronted with a curtain, being born
into this vast uterus,
lined with a sky porous with stars.

Binoy Majumdar

Posted over on Poems & Poetics

Translated by Jyotirmoy Datta