Every year when I show balance sheet of loan, you say-
I’ll clear all this year. But Invitation card of the Year-end
And New Year is sent back from your address
The old peon says smiling
May be the address is wrong
My balance sheet is not updated.
I never have mistaken your address

A name I’ve written on a blade of grass
On the date my mother breathed her last.


[Translated from 'Batshorik' (Bengali) by Oindrila Mukherjee]

It happened that sometimes I kissed in mirrors the reflection of my face, since the hands, face and tears of Annalena had caressed it, it seemed to me divinely beautiful as if suffused with heavenly sweetness. I liked her velvet wetness, long voyages in the delta her legs. A striving upstream toward her beating heart through more and more savage currents saturated with the light of hops and bindweed. And our vehemence and triumphant laughter and our hasty dressing in the middle of the night to walk on the stone stairs of the upper city.

They all gather round the man in his seventies
Who is on a fast-unto-death against the muck:

I hear the flutter of a change in the spring wind!

------
(Written on 6.4.2011 in honour of the social activist Anna Hazare, for his fast against corruption at Jantar Mantar, New Delhi.)

"இப்பொழுதும்
அங்குதான்
இருக்கிறீர்களா? "
என்று
கேட்டார்
"எப்பொழுதும் br>அங்குதான் இருப்பேன்"
என்றேன்.

Keep thou
Thy tearless watch
All night but when blue-dawn
Breathes on the silver moon, then weep!
Then weep!

Rash, angry words, and spoken out of season,
When passion has usurp'd the throne of reason,
Have ruin'd many. Passion is unjust,
And for an idle, transitory gust
Of gratified revenge, dooms us to pay
With long repentence at a later day.

Angels at the foot,
And Angels at the head,
And like a curly little lamb
My pretty babe in bed.

Came of old to houses lonely
Men with wings, but did not show them:
Angels come to our house, only,
For their wings, they do not know them!

Long with us, now she leaves us; she has rest
Beneath our sacred sod:
A woman vowed to Good, whom all attest,
The daylight gift of God.