~Hari Adhikari~
Translated by Yuyutsu Sharma
Dust-colored, fragile-limbed,
and of medium height,
these wandering women
are my weakness
and my lost pride too.
Bare to the bone,
foul-smelling and famished,
these kids are my family inmates,
and live pictures of my lost childhood.
Near agony of frozen hearth,
empty cooking bowls
and dispossessed huts,
I meet them,
these sunken-cheeked
feverish images of my love.
In the dried-up
water wells of their famished eyes
lie the greatest
dreams of my youth.
That mob
of famished human beings
emerging on the unfortunate track
engulfed by ugly chaos of untimely landslides,
they are my tribe
and the population of my tribe.
Out of that moaning woman’s womb
shuffling along the nightmare of that crowd
distributing blessed food of tears and sweat
was I born on a similar cold highway.
Now, turning over the poisoned harvest
of guilt when I am forced to live with these kids
and these women,
very true incarnations of hunger,
,
I can’t simply be translated
into a line of a poem,
just like the mighty, large-limed demons,
who having forcedly owned
the water, air and light can’t say
they have justly shared the earth
and glory of its great womb.
(Source : Drunkenboat.com)
