Mirabai

It's True I Went To The Market

My friend, I went to the market and bought the Dark One.
You claim by night, I claim by day.
Actually I was beating a drum all the time I was buying him.
You say I gave too much; I say too little.
Actually, I put him on a scale before I bought him.
What I paid was my social body, my town body, my family body, and all my inherited jewels.
Mirabai says: The Dark One is my husband now.
Be with me when I lie down; you promised me this in an earlier life.

[Translated by Robert Bly]

Mirabai

 

In this very interesting poem, Mira challenges the religious norms by using the language of business. She is a customer who buys Krishna, her god, her lover. What's more, she weighs him as she would vegetables or grain! And, of course, she has to pay quite a bit, including her body, to own him. In the final punch line, she is the one who makes him stick to his promise. Notice, throughout she asserts her agency. Her spiritual striving is not left to destiny. 

 

Akka Mahadevi

I have fallen in love

I have fallen in love, O mother with the
Beautiful One, who knows no death,
knows no decay and has no form;

I have fallen in love, O mother with the
Beautiful One, who has no middle, has
no end, has no parts and has no features;

I have fallen in love, O mother with the
Beautiful One, who knows no birth and
knows no fear.

I have fallen in love, O mother with the
Beautiful One, who is without any family,
without any country and without any peer;
Chenna Mallikarjuna, the Beautiful, is my husband.
Fling into the fire the husbands who are subject
to death and decay.

Akka Mahadevi 

(from www.poemhunter.com)

Akka Mahadevi, a major Kannada poet, is highly revered for her talent as well as her beliefs. True to the bhakti or devotional tradition, she expresses her love for Krishna (Mallikarjuna) using the language of human bonding. The divine husband is beyond form and substance, but is Real, compared to the flesh and blood men who are terribly wanting. The provocative final lines make us question if human love can ever reach the kind of ultimate intimacy she has with the Beautiful One, her divine husband.

What I find interesting in this poem is her address to the mother of the Beautiful One. The mother is as powerful as her son--a universal belief in the feminine energy at the center of divinity itself--but the mother is the intercessor, the ultimate arbiter.

Taslima Nasreen reads at the 2006 Dodge Poetry Festival

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zI1DsRSYw8E

Hear Taslima Nasreen read her translations of her original poems, "You Go Girl" and "A Letter to My Mother."  I did not expect the ending in the first poem. It was a thunderbolt. And the second one, an autobiographical one, was a melancholy tribute to her mother who died of cancer. Taslima Nasreen, exiled from her country, Bangladesh, was living for a while in Sweden and then in India. She writes that she is a poet, a woman, without land, religion, or family. She finds solace among like-minded people of any background. Writing is her companion.

We can react with anger at Taslima's poems because of their militant tone, or we can feel the urgency for us to be more compassionate human beings and treat each other with respect and dignity. Think about it: Why should a country feel so threatened by someone's poems as to exile them?  When I look at the fate of poets who are exiled by their governments, it is then that I realize the power poetry has to change repressive policies.

Kazi Nazrul Islam

The following poem is from www.museindia.com, 2008, Issue #22

1st Prize – Debjani Chatterjee: Tr.of Kazi Nazrul Islam (Bengali)

Excerpt of Nazrul Islam's original poem in Bengali

Poems translated from Bengali by Debjani Chatterjee


We Are Two Flowers On The Same Stalk

We are two flowers on the same stalk - Hindu and Muslim.
The Muslim is the jewel of its eye, the Hindu is its life.
In the lap of Mother Sky
we swing like sun and moon;
we are the same blood in the same throbbing vein beneath the same chest.
We breathe the same land’s air, we drink the same land’s water;
we are the fruits and flowers that bloom on the same mother’s breast.
On the same country’s soil we find our final rest:
some in burial grounds and some on funeral pyres.
We call our mother in the same tongue, we sing the same tune.
Not recognising each other in the night’s darkness, we come to blows;
but in the morning we shall know each other as brothers.
We will weep and embrace each other,
we will ask each other’s pardon.
On that day our Hindustan will smile with pride!

Commentary:

Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976), national poet of Bangladesh, advocated passionately the unity of Hindus and Muslims.  Although a Muslim, he wrote poems inspired by Goddess Kali. In this poem, “We are Two Flowers on the Same Stalk,” Kazi Nazrul uses cosmic and elemental images to describe the symbiotic connection between Hindus and Muslims. This poem, although bound by the historical time period of the partition of India and Pakistan, continues to ring true today.

Pramila Venkateswaran

Gopalakrishna Adiga's "Do Something, Brother"

Gopalakrishna Adiga (1918-1992), winner of the Sahitya Akademy Award, India’s highest literary honor given to a writer, is a prolific Kannada poet. “Do Something Brother,” translated into English by the famous A.K. Ramanjan, is an ironic poem where the narrator is rooting for all human beings engaged in the act of senseless destruction of nature. The repetition of the imperative, “do,” “find,” “break,” “crush” gathers in intensity as the poem moves along and reaches the penultimate moment of “do anything,” and the ultimate, “This is natural./This is the one thing needful.” The conversational tone of the narrator only makes the devastation caused by us all the more hard-hitting. This ultimate ironic play on the destruction of nature as natural points to the human being excoriated of his/her humanity. Note Adiga’s exhaustive listing of images of the natural world to show its vulnerability to our very presence on earth! 

Ernesto Cardenal's "The Parrots"

I find Ernesto Cardenal's poem, "The Parrots," simply amazing. He tells the story told to his friend Michel, a commanding officer, about finding a shipment of parrots that was going to be sent to the U.S to learn English! Some had died and when the men took them back to the place from where they had been taken, upon opening the cage,they flew toward the mountains, their home. The turn in the poem occurs when the poet writes, "That's what the Revolution did with us." It was as if the comrades had given the parrots their freedom just as they had found theirs. The poem ends with, "But there were 47 dead." Freedom comes at a price.
You can find this poem in Ernesto Cardenal, New and Selected Poems, ed. Jonathan Cohen.