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by: Sofiul Azam
| Monsoon, that’s Kalidasa’s elixir of life, | | that cloud-messenger for sad hearts – | | living apart in dry-hard lands off the coast;
yes, in this tropical heartland’s North
where at last after sunshine’s steel-
hard glazes like pristine spears thrown out
into exhausted eyes with summer’s heat-
waves lashing at desperate retinas,
it comes with the winds of change,
(O, isn’t it that Kalidasa’s clouds again?)
with cloaks of coolness on their shoulders,
ruffling sun-paled boughs of arjunas,
ketakis and kadambas, electrified
flashes of lightning and the high-pitched
rumble of raging clouds, then raindrops
sprinkling like bliss on thirsty lips,
ankle-deep dust turning into thick mud,
later the newly-weds’ hastening to bed-
chambers as in old Kalidasa’s rain-soaked
days when even the season united
the separated in love-making. Then
everything you touch starts bristling
up with gleams of a new life; smoothly
comes the fragrance of monsoon
flowers that remind wayfaring husbands
of their wives back home and smells
arising out of their bodies; nicely
glitter the rain-washed trees at North’s
historical sites where people's rush was
less in midsummer though now rotten
leftovers and thick mud float into the streets,
sewage in every city’s clogged drains.
Boys & girls, let’s celebrate the season,
take off what you let go dry in hearts’
chambers, forget that it’s our carrot hearts
hard boiled in summer’s big cauldrons:
O come and go bathe in diamonds –
raindrops falling soft on naked faces, arms
see your women’s lusty second skins
getting wet in rain’s bliss. Come straight
away and watch flashes of thunderlight –
these fine tapestries done on darkening skies,
the sap of freshness rising into this life:
ah, it’s the end of desert’s dryness.
Wayfarers, as I watch in the lovely rains
sprouts of green grass everywhere,
maalatis creeping over rusted iron-gates,
and the rainbow dyed in hearts’ hues,
the rain-trees green against clouds
‘dangling down with the weight of water’
like ladies’ earrings and waist-strings,
I see in my mind’s eye Kalidasa’s
calligraphy of clouds on the wide blue,
and hear the rains’ guttural music,
and O yes, ‘Heart, indulge your desire’
like the King in love with Sakuntala.
Oh, even if solicitors’ etiquette is fine,
their papers full of wit and cunning,
and senators’ lapidary speeches great,
it’s awful not to go out in the rain,
not wetting hearts’ inveterate dryness;
my heart is on a go-slow campaign:
those sizzling hot days being at last over,
let all hearts be spiced with romance. |
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