Sunday Poem: The Song

These days you sing

At almost every gathering

And I follow you shamelessly.

I breathlessly drink your voice

Its shape, texture and tone

With an abandon

That sometimes shocks even me.

 

Perhaps you do not know

That before I come

To listen to you

I take off

All the noise around me.

I find my way back

After the abandon of your songs

Through my very own

Lost track to home.

 

These songs are enough to forget

The history of your memories

For the resolution of the defects

In my horoscope.

They are as dense and close

As the excitement of the claps

Occasioned by your songs.

 

Even I had left home one day

Thinking that I too

Will learn to sing.

I really do not know how

But I was back home

The next afternoon

Having caught

The first train in the morning.

 

When I hear your songs these days

It seems as if

I am offering you a glass of chilled water

After having glimpsed

The bareness of your hands.

 

When I hear your songs these days

It seems as if

There is a staircase

Going up till the sky

On which I am straining hard

To go and harvest the moon

On a new moon night.

 

Thus, please keep on singing

I am there, always,

Invisible

To frame the visions.

 

I keep on clapping shamelessly

In the breathless abandon

Of the visions

Not induced by your songs.

 

(The poet originally written in Odia by Bharat Majhi has been translated into English by Sailen Routray)