My bier-bearing poem by Dr. Rajendra Bhandari
Fallen to bad company
my published poems
have become rowdy sons.
Deserting me midway
they become strangers
smiling wryly at me,
severed of all ties
not even a letter.
But the unwritten poem
inside me,
my very own unwritten poem,
attending on me for ages,
will come to shoulder my bier,
Could do nothing for it,
except, perhaps, injustice,
by not writing it,
Had I written it,
it too might have fared no better
than its elder brothers.
my unwritten poem,
forever entrapped within me
forbidden to sprout,
while I played the hero, a villain, a jester
on many platforms.
After each performance
when dialogues and costumes are cast off
my unwritten poems wait on me,
lies beside me
even as I sleep, as I slumber.
And yet I did nothing for it
not made even a simple paper-hut.
But it will moisten my parched lip
as I lie on my death bed.
This, ever fragrant lotus,
saturated in my blood,
my musk-pod, my bosom friend.
my unwritten poem
will bear my bier one day.
-Translated from Nepali by Pankaj Thapa
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Rajendra Bhandari is a Reader in the Nepali Department of the Sikkim Government College at Tadong in Gangtok. He has published four collections of poems in Nepali, the first of which appeared in 1979. He has a doctorate in Nepali literature. Bhandari has won awards for his poetry, including the 1981 Diyalo Purashkar in Poetry from the Nepali Sahitya Sammelan in Darjeeling, the 1998 Shiva Kumar Rai Memorial Award from the South Sikkim Sahitya Sammelan and the 1999 Dr. Shova Kanti Thegim Memorial Award for poetry from the Shovakanti Memorial Trust in Gangtok.
Pankaj Thapa is the Head of the English Department in Sikkim Government College, Tadong. His work includes illustrations for the Folktales of the Lepchas written by Yishey. D published from Tranquebar, Bangalore. He is a cartoonist and a translator too.
