Scented Butterfly

Scented Butterfly
Poems by Hiren Bhattacharya
Translated from original Asomiya
By Dibyajyoti Sarma

Ambrosia Till Now

1
Memory is beyond sadness
Whistling goes away the green valley
2
Mouthful of blood. The sun is hanged
Scaffold is the sky
3
In the long-breathed filthy sky who are you the figurine of sorrow

*

Defeat

Holding the colourless night
On his lap, he sits
As if a child
Just dead

I do not know any other name of
Defeat, probably
An achromatic
Sky

Who knows where the sky
Gathers
So much darkness!

*

Impossible Translation

At an excuse I can go away wherever
I feel like, in the magic night of your company
I’ll go away at any excuse
Unbarring the roads of endowment, in the fame of solitude dependent
Shadow this presence of yours
Impossible its translation, passing through the
Wrought moonlight, I’ll go away, slowly, very slowly…
(in some jasmine night)

*

International

Buoyant like brooks
Cool like corps holding my mother’s hand
I tour from one futureless present
To another present!

On my way the sky is filled with
My neighbours and friends’ best wishes
Like resonance of some sacred
Music

Holding my mother’s hand I tour
From one country to another
My neighbours and friends
Draws closer to me

Holding my mother’s hand I tour

*

Missed Aim

I’m dead
Inside
This talking, listening to songs
(Even your song)
Is a habit

Are there dead fishes
Under water!

To tell the truth
I’m dying every moment

Too arduous is this breathing

*

Protest
(In memory of Sankar Purkayastha)

Going out at dawn
He returned back in the evening
To his mother

The boy who roamed alone
Today after a long time has slept
So close to his mother

In his blood-smeared body
Still blazes
Eighteen years of a treasured dream

*

Searching Arrows
(In name of peace and freedom)

Right here I harnessed the swift horse of
Your youth. Like spring breezes
The dust of that horse’s hoof
Kissed
My crimson sky
And the green grass of the horizon

After that passed by
Blazing autumnal fires and many
Tornadoes of Bohag

…Suddenly sometimes
I wake up in my dream
In Africa or Telengana somewhere
As if that horse gallops wildly
And on your whips flickers
The impotency of a solitary night!

*

Song of Spring
(To a poet)

Yester night heavy fog covered everything
On the foothills
A bird the whole night
Singing made the sky cry

At dawn
On trees, shrubs, on mountain peaks
Like bokul flowers
Dropped the dew

If spring could come
In the voice of a bird
If her swift wings could
Remove the fog

*

The First Lesson

I, this persona, including everything, whatever is there
How they exist, the same way, without any addition or deletion
Or whatever is lost or what
I can never get even if I kill myself
That solitary dream of mine like the shadows of
Bougainvillea in the garden of ebullience stays with me as such
That I cannot leave them even for a second
All that is lost or whatever is there, and whatever lies
In my incontestable future

*

The World is My Poem

Pen is my hammer of the smith, breaking
Beating, I create words
Sharp like a farmer’s plough, golden Sita in the furrow
Edged like a carpenter’s blade
Cracking the fibre of hard wood I fetch
Blood-daubed words of experience, like the arrows of a tribal youth’s bow
Piercing is my each word
Grows expansive in blood-flesh-desire
Some of them are egoist like hills
Other docile like rivers and yet others sombre like lakes
Do not obey anybody’s order

Drawn in ocean-rive-mountain I’m the poet of a vast continent
The world is my poem

*

Again

Every day I’ve one or other death
Long life on the lines of the palm
I live this way. Listening to the footsteps
Of dream’s fairy I think alone:
Life is more beautiful that it can
Actually be

*

Blue Shirt
(On the death of Rajen Hazarika)

When death is inconsequential news
Faraway in self-melody below fluttering breathes
Lies seed of live constellation…
We picked up that heartfelt picture
On the terminally ill busy bedside
Revered blue shirt!

*

He

Looking for you
He returned back
In the solitary darkness of silence
In meaningless light
Diffident, he searched for
You

The twisted lines of his unforgiving face
Confirmed like the sun
Vivid and direct light
Lustrous like a blood red flower
On a healthy morning
His body trembled violently
In the poverty of your unruly state

I was scared
If he finds you!

I closed the doors and
Windows. In the burning of heart’s
Nothingness I weep alone:
Oh, how terribly we are helpless!

*

In Blood Letters

How will it do for you
To be so easily overstrung?

Poetry was never my route
Only the gloom of defeat
Taught me to admit the truth

Poetry was never my route

*

Mine and the World’s

5
I exist this way: grief is my child, have to
Hold it in both hands every time. On the tongue is the salt of sadness,
Barfs rice gruel ! Can’t get angry easily
Like a responsible father I know
How to control my anger
And what is forgiveness. I have grave responsibility
The onerous responsibility to rear my grieves into success
Drenched in solitude is my sick body
At an attempt to say something from the pharynx
Spreads blood inside and out on the face

7
Comrade, the heart aches, let the gun warm my heart
Don’t remove it; keep my middle finger
On the trigger: let incessant thunder surge from the gun point
What to fear once the night passes?
Together we’ll reach the open fields of Beltola.

*

Murdered-heart

I am murdered by my
Friend. Before death what do
People think? Childhood,
The golden days of youth or something else —I don’t know

Before I was murdered looking at the sharp knife of
My friend, I thought of
Lustrous death. Therefore, reservedly I offered my life
To my friend:
The way we put a rose on
On our beloved’s hair bun.

I’m killed. Ceased with my friend
Rose-like many dialogues.

*

Memory’s Its Scented Butterfly

1
Humming
Trembles the tree’s docile shade, rays on the leaves
In a moment
Falls on my heart
Speechless days
Who is not Christianised yet.

2

Poems are usually free; memory’s its scented butterfly

3
While leaving put off the moist clothes
On the soggy garments there’s the key of knowledge
The night of full moon
Slowly behind the mountain
The moon descends
Wails the jingle of my aphonic song

*

Shelter

That night I went to a new country
The entirety of that new land contained star-studded
Bright blue a flag

The wind from the sea fluttered the flag
Malleable weaves of love. From the forest
Enclosed by darkness, surged
Like the sound of a shepherd boy’s horn
A free tune

On hearing the tune like a wounded beast
I run back to my own country
On my return path like the petals of flowers
The bright stars for the blue flag
Crashed one after another

My country, my own country, the bud of my first love
Your seven rivers like seven jewels
What deep affinity of love
How could I forget?

*

Sun Desire

Sleepless night
I dream
Floral-luxuriant your face
Crop-golden smile

Awaking a thousand stars
As if the Sun Descends

*

The Unrivaled

Who fights with death, the music of life
Is exact at the minuteness of death, sound is whose
Tune’s eternal quote
Behind my back, there is a colossal man—poem person
I walk beside his shadow colleting falling leaves of memory
Light passes through clear dreams. I don’t know what a poem is
Who the companions are on the road of my fearsome journey, or
My own trammels; I come out breaking my own statuette
Or alive in my entire persona I enter into the ground
I am completely under the ground, soil touches my body
Soil surrounds me from above and beneath
Soil is in my salty tongue

*

You’re Lake, Blessed Peace

1
Without bidding good bye the river leaves
That’s the rule of river’s leaving
You’re lake, blessed peace
Below the water
Blood
Sparkling

2
The small pigment is covered with blood lotus
Your all scented girl body
Surprised

The broken house of my heart!
On the shadow of the scintillating masculine day
Dries
The royal robe of love

3
Breeze, don’t create a ripple, don’t break the focus of love
Long breathe of peace
On illiterate sky-slate the black letter of cloud
Tonight it’ll rain
Placid rain
The friction of art reverberates the soil of creation
Soil water will cover me
Let it cover
The cropless, seedless nature and the foetus of my ruined poem
Tonight it’ll rain
Exorbitant rain

First month of Asomiya calendar (15th April – 15th May), the time of spring festival.