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Jibanananda Das - 1946-47
Work rating: Medium

There`s a rather indistinct human anxiety all around in the day`s light:
on streets, in alleys, on tram line tracks and sidewalks;
Somewhere just now another`s home is to be auctioned-it seems,
Dirt cheap.
Everyone is going to take advantage of everyone else and
Thereby get to heaven ahead of all.
Many must be out of breath, but
A couple or even one person may buy, through deceiving many,
The house and furniture on auction-or even all the things
That aren`t up for sale.
In this world, interest accrues: but not for everyone.
Indescribable bank notes in the hands of one or two persons.
And these high-ranking persons of the world demand
And take everything, even women.
The rest of mankind, like profuse leaves of late autumn in darkness,
Wish to fly off toward a river somewhere,
or toward the ground- and mix in with some germinating seed
of the earth. Even knowing that many births have been destroyed, still
The proprietress must take possession of the familiar waters, partial
light,
When again she returns in the smell of sunshine, in immortality of
dust, grass, flowers:
And considering this, they blend into the darkness.

They disappeared then dead.
The dead never return to this world.
Are the dead nowhere; are they somewhere?
It seems the dead are nowhere except in the hearts
of peaceful men pacing some November path;
In that case, it would be well calmly to enjoy
Light, food, sky, and woman somewhat before death.

Thousands of Bengali villages, silent and powerless, sink into
hopelessness and lightlessness.
When the sun sets, a certain lovely haired darkness
Comes to fix her hair in-a bun-but by whose hands?

But it remains loose and flowing as she gazes out-but for whom?
There are no hands-no person anywhere; one of the thousand Bengali
village
Nights, smiling, like a picture on some scroll, some floral decoration,
Had almost become a beautifully wife-eyed woman; then all was
extinguished .

Here that day too they caught the scent of newly harvested rice;
Many crows, in the sunlight and flavor of the new rice,
At the conch-shell calls blown by the eldest and so on in this
  neighborhood-by lower-caste women of that neighborhood,
Flew in and ate of the nectar, then left;
Now there`s no sound not even of all those crows;
Human skulls and bones do not finitely enumerate man;
In time`s hand he is limitless.

Over there in the field on a moonlight night the peasants used to dance,
After drinking strange rice wine, prior to the wedding
of a boatman with the little goddess daughter of a low-caste
fisherman-
And after the marriage-and before the birth of their child.
And those children today are nearly trampled to death
In the exhausted, ignorant crowded human community
of this age`s evil nation-states; the great grandfathers of all these
present
Village children have laughed, played, and loved-and now gone to
sleep
In darkness after raising permanently the zemindars` hook-swinging
tree. 
They were not much better then; still,
Compared with the blind and tattered village beings
of today`s famines and riots and sorrows and illiteracy,
They were the inhabitants of some separate, obvious world.

Is everything today hazy? It is now difficult to think clearly;
The rule is to keep everyone informed with half-truths in darkness;
And then alone in that darkness it has become the practice
To surmise the other half of the truth; and everyone
Looks at everyone else out of the corner of his eye.

The inner thoughts of creation are-enmity.
The inner thoughts of creation: the dragging of a shadow of
our doubts over our sincerity and thus bringing us pain.
We see a fountain of water gush forth from nature`s
Mountains and stones and then we gaze into our hearts
And see that because the first water is red with the blood of the slain,
The tiger is still today chasing after the deer;
I have killed man-my body is filled with his
Blood; I am the brother of this fallen brother

On the paths of the world; he considered me his younger brother
Yet the heart hardened and he felled me, and I lie
Sleeping beside the bloody swells in this river, having slain
The ignorant one who was like an elder sibling-burying their heads
In his narrow chest, they appeal to all who
Have taken the affectionate vow of life,
Yet since there is no light anywhere, they sleep on.

They sleep on.
If I were to call, then from the river of blood as it
Billowed up, coming close by, he would say, "I am Yasin,
Hanif Mahammad Makbul Karim Aziz-
And you?" placing a hand upon my chest and
Raising up those eyes from his dead face, he would
Ask-that blood river welling up would say,
"Gagan, Bipin, Sasi, of Pathuria Ghata;
of Manik Tala, of Syam Bazar, or Galif Street, of Entaly -
Who knew from where; they are all men of
Life`s low classes; ragged shoes on their feet
They purchase the bug-damaged articles in the market;
Through creation`s relentless drive
All these tiny beings awoke-and in the rays of the afternoon sun
Suddenly all these atomlike neglected lives of the
Luminous world had appeared beautiful in the bright
Eyes of some of the intellectuals.
The sounds that arise in the stream of the sun`s light,
In the titillated bodies of these particles, in the collision of these
particles,
There time, in the music of its incomparable voice,
Speaks; to whom does it speak? Yasin, Makbul, Sasi
Suddenly came near and before saying anything
Spoke at length as if from the interior of a half-fragmented eternity;
yet-
Eternity is not fragmented; thus that dream, effort, speech
Have vanished within the unfragmented eternity;
There is no one, nothing-the sun has gone out.

In this age there`s much less light everywhere, however.
We have now squeezed out a value from the fabricated stories
About dignity of thought, determination, mistakes, pain, work, tales
of this world`s many days and collected it
In sentence, word, language, and incomparable style of speech.
Man`s language, however, is merely an exercise if it does not receive
light
From outside of immediate experience; attributes; a skeleton of
Scattered helpless words far distant from knowledge.
Though we`ve inherited much learning, yet
The science of this century of ours is merely a crowd of
Collected things-which merely grows larger;
              
However, because it has no heart at all, there is not
Meaningtul knowledge in the world today; without knowledge there`s
no love.

In this age nowhere is there any light-no gracious light
Before the eyes of the travelers; nothing like the mother of
Radiated dark night: washing away all faults
of man`s overwhelmed body-of man`s overwhelmed mind,
Hidden in the solitary darkness, devoid of human gatherings
No one is asked any more-answers to previously
Asked questions arc no longer wanted-simply surrounded by
noiseless,
Deathless darkness, all faults, weariness, fear, mistakes, sins
Become passionless-this life gradually becomes devoid of sorrow,
A refreshing cool fills the heart; as though at the edges of the
direction-marked
Sea, beloved voices of wind come merging
Into several devadaru trees-that incessant, sure-flowing wind
Upon the bloody soul of man-man`s life is without stain.
Today is there not in this world such a pervasive darkness?
Is there no sweet breeze, no profundity, no purity?
Yet man, as he turns from the blind state of adversity toward soothing
darkness,
From darkness toward the celebration of his new cities and villages
Where degradation has not set in even today-an area of self-
awareness,
Transcending the sources of error and sin in his heart,
Does remain, it seems to me.
Come forward, oh knowledge, humility, unclouded vision, peace,
light, love.
Source
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