Translated from the Bengali by Boudhayan Mukherjee

Knife

Prestigious service with lucrative salary,
Substantial pension after retirement,
Costly car, luxurious house… furniture…
Children well established in England-America,
Regular morning walks, health checkups
And every year
Vacation tours to the hills or the seas—
But why void does matter in all of your happiness ?

There is no news of your son’s next promotion,
Nothing is known if your daughter
Got her fellowship…
And why the banks with quick interval
Are cutting down the interest rates on Fixed Deposits?
These worries remain awake all the while
And are stopping your sleep !

From the very start of your adolescence
The beautiful nymphs used to crowd like—
Swarm of locusts
You did bypass casually the sad nectar
Of young rose of a lass refused in love !
That’s why no sadness ever entered your
happy go lucky world
And you never had a chance to see the
Important aspects of life.

Sometimes happiness can back stab you
Like a full blown traitor…

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The Stone that I have never seen rolling

The Stone that I have never seen rolling—
I have seen it lying sedately on the cosmic path
As a huge lifeless mass
Free from all bias.
Suddenly it started rolling downwards
Harking, stop my downfall and haul me upwards.
Albert Camus was in my head
And I had heard his story of Sisyphus,
But I’m no Sisyphus, neither I have
The strength and energy of his.
I only thought with my logical dreams
To change the course of the rolling stone.

But due to various frictions, real or supernatural
The stone fractures and erodes within itself
And that has no tradition or inheritance…

Dreams are flowing streams,
That exist in the core of inheritance
And lives eternally in life and after life

Even after holocaust and annihilation
Of the Jews in concentration camps
Fuehrer Adolph Hitler
Couldn’t kill the Jewish dream

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