[Transcreation] Lessons in counter revolution

Perhaps, unable to bear the poet’s torture
or maybe, to clean off their burden of repression,
in one of those mundane evenings, words,
revolted against the poets.
Harvesters of words,
are not the poets farmers?
Disregarding sacred texts,
Turning deaf ear to the diktats of gospels,
breaking the shackles of settled notions
disbanded from the lines binding them,
they spread over the assembly ground.

They were many and different
Some, brittle by their assumed inferiority
Some, proud of their varied meanings
Some, with coloured skins, with masks
Some, who were transcreated
Some, colloquial, transplanted
They were many and different

From New Delhi, one which clothes in Khadi,
in winters and summers,
one which fell off an Academy winning poem,
with its wounds still fresh, proclaimed aloud
“From the meaningless bonds
of those who crave for meaning in their poems,
we walk free today”

A word, lean, clad in its Bangla attire,
one which dreamt of lightning in spring,
so it spoke,
“The incarceration of symbolism over,
to gain, only a new world to breath”

Darting out unseen from the loud songs
of a head-banger’s ball,
dark, oversized, a word,
to keep its coarse voice still a mystery,
only clapped.
As sound of the clap died down in the crowd,
standing across the ground,
a word, embodied in glass, early to arrive,
broke into a thousand pieces and cried,
“There are only shadows in place of symbols now
I broke the brittle cage of poetry today
and the wounds of freedom, don’t pain”

Head shaved, clad as a monk,
deftly acting out the drama of life’s economics,
a word, one which escaped the fast current of poetry,
in its booming voice, uttered clichéd words,
“I will no longer grow in the farmer’s fields
Sprout, I will, in pastures, as fodder for the connoisseur”

A word, stumbled off a Haiku
and rolled on like a bead, singing
“One or a Tonne, I am still happy!!!”

“Who will lead the revolution?”
was the question troubling the minds
of words which fell of revolutionary songs

As times passed by, a word,
resembling an earthworm,
no, maybe a train, or even a black snake,
cried with an alarming shriek,
“My soil has attained life!!!”

Bent under the burden of its voice,
young, yet impoverished, lean and thin,
a word, cried, trampled in the crowd.

Darkened by the impact of light, a word,
and another, attired in unfitting clothes of a satire,
by the time they reached, it was too late

One, sounding like a gong,
and another looking like a wood-splinter
tried hard to keep in control
a word, with uncontrollable zeal.

An old, haggard word
and another, long forgotten,
stood in a corner, away from the crowd.

As twilight announced advent of the night,
words got invisible to each other
To see words in the dark,
is a magic known only to the poets,
and the truth is
that all splits and drifts which occur
are without destinations and directionless

A few young poets,
experts in the art of counter-revolutions,
predicted this long back.
As how the peasants stood up united
against the Aristocrats,
how can seeds ever revolt against a farmer?

Poem titled “PrativiplavapaaDhanGal”
by Venu Kunduurkunnu in Malayalam

Trancreation:
Vijay © 1st December, 2005