~Punya Gautam ‘Bishwas’~
Translated by Yuyutsu Sharma
A wounded mountain
ravaged by a landslide
a huddled hut
aflame from a corporate trickster
a green paddy field
upturned by a relentless floods
a black statue
bathed in warm blood
a rabid democracy
or stunts
of a sleazy slut
What is the ugliest of all?
In any event
a stark naked poem licks pinnacles of obscenity
a poem naked
in the heart of a poet whose
ideas are thrashed
to go hiding in the madhouses of illicit entertainments
a poet whose words are stolen second hand shoes
from the Ratna Park pavements and the brutal shrines of faith.
Every now and then images leap up
swirling into the fires of self immolation…
And now in the season of remarkable rumors,
endlessly fertile in producing naked poems
a poet gets transported
into a balloon and floats up in the sky,
a butcher king’s canopy…
And as in a cursed fairy tale
the regal poem trapped in the body of the balloon bursts….
Right there the royal poet wearing
a cactus-garland of shining syllable of fake decorations also dies.
All day long the nation’s regime
cries phony tears in the memory of his great balloon poem
that lay languishing
in its smelly crotch for decades
and in the end
like a feral dog of a blind beggar died.
