Five poems by Pravasini Mahakuda have been translated to English from Odia by Snehaprava Das
YOUR POETRY
You do not get liberated by arguments.
Liberation isn’t on your mind,
Neither is it in your fortitude or your courage,
Nor in the tricky manoeuvring of your steps.
Liberation is in the challenges
Your soul ceaselessly confronts.
Salvation is in each line of the poem you write.
Do you know or do you not?
That even after you quit this beautiful earth,
Your poetry will live.
Readers of poetry will continue to be.
Your poetry will live forever because
You hold a timeless lover inside you,
And because of your love,
Which is liberation itself.
Your poetry will thrive as a green permanence,
Even on a blazing summer noon.
You and your poetry are one,
And have never existed apart.
You yourself are poetry --
Only poetry, and nothing else.
Because like you, Poetry, too, is a woman>
And you, like poetry itself
Are the eternal Truth.
THE REST OF THEM
Let the rest of them
Write about revolutions
And resistances,
About rights and responsibilities.
I write about life.
I write about love,
And things that happen around me.
I write about the changing seasons,
About the prices of goods,
Of the soreness hidden in the heart.
I write about the hopes and fears that
The heart incessantly wavers between,
Of an unseen wound that never stops to hurt.
I write about the eye that cannot see
The tears trickle down the other one,
Or the drenched pillow and the sari-end.
I write about a hand
That does not care to share
The ache in the other one.
I write about the song the dead river
That flowed once between us had sung.
Let others write about
What they won and lost.
I will write about the pain emanating from
An aspired for void.
Let others write about spite and disdain,
I will sing of life and love.
SHRAVANA*
For which Shravana must the woman
Write a poem now?
What kind of a poem of Shravana
Must she write to sprinkle life
Into the desert dying inside her
To cheer herself up?
Do you think it is easy to write poetry?
You do not know perhaps,
Only a drop of rain comes down
Against millions of palmfuls of tears.
In that lone drop of rain,
Rings a primeval tune
That perhaps lay buried under
A century old rock.
You had never been in that song
In any phase of life,
Not as friend, a husband or a neighbour
Neither as a reader, nor a critic.
The agony is because
You were never a part of that song.
The Shravana is because
You were never a part of that song.
And the rain is because of that,
And the poem too!
It’s half-hour past eight.
On this evening of a Shravana Sunday
The Shravana pours generously.
Do you believe a woman somewhere
Still sits waiting for you on this evening,
Watching her own silent tears
Mingle in the Shravana rains outside?
*Month of July-August in the Indian calendar, normally monsoons in India.
GODDESS
She is not a goddess --
The one you invoked while
Immersing,
Or immersed while
Invoking.
She is a woman.
Perhaps you have not cared to see
The tears in the eyes of that goddess.
During those performances,
You have time and again played games
With her body and her tears.
Every night,
On the freshly made beds
And in freshly written verses too.
You always know that the
Finale of the game
Will be under your control
And by your choice.
Because you have ensured the result
Would be in your favour,
You have taken the game for granted.
SAREE
The pain and pangs I have lived through
Are as many
As the threads woven
In my saree.
The end of the saree fails to hold
the profusion of
All honour and dishonour,
All joys and sorrows,
Interest and indifference,
The ache of losing things
I had won,
The ecstasy of loving
And the agony of no response.
As I set out on a journey,
The sorrow-flowers bloom in a row
Along the border of the saree,
Spring into life.
As innocent symbols of that agony,
A scene floats past my mind in a flash
Where I find the whole of my being
Standing by the loom.
I marvel at the intimate emotion
Of a beautiful loving mind
Employed at the act of weaving
Such a saree of choice.
The threads in this saree
I am clad in are as many as
The sorrows and sufferings,
Joys and elations that roll
Inside me like the gentle undulations of
The middle notes of a song.
Pravasini Mahakuda is a distinguished Odia poet and translator with 18 original books and 8 books in translation from Hindi to Odia. She has received the Odisha Sahitya Akademi award, Jhankar Award and Junior and Senior Fellowships from the Ministry of Culture, Govt. of India. Her international engagements include participation in poetry festivals in Germany presenting her work in Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Leipzig and Frankfurt. She regularly contributes poems in national magazines and attends seminars and poetry festivals across India.
Dr.Snehaprava Das, is a noted writer and a translator from Bhubaneswar, Odisha. She has five books of poems, three of stories and thirteen collections of translated texts (from Odia to English), to her credit.
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