Now I Want To Own A Hill Poem by Tathagata Mukhopadhyay

(Core idea from a Bengali prose by an anonymous writer)

I know not how to get one, yet
My dream now, is to own a hill,
I know not who would sell it though,
I know not how to foot the bill.

A tiny island I had had,
When I was but a small boy,
An isle colored with butterflies,
Where I danced, pranked and played with joy.

Lost in my little world,
My island of a childhood,
Where the sea washed its shores,
I thought it’d stay ‘ere for good.

But then I attained my youth,
And fell in love with a curvy stream,
The slender bubbly chirpy river,
Was all that then I could dream.

I exchanged my isle of boyhood
For the lissome lively brook,
A bad bargain, opined all,
While I thought they all mistook.

I talked to my river dear,
In my lonesome solitaire
She’d always answer my queries,
Her deepest secrets she’d share.

“Would it rain this evening? ”
I’d once asked my stream
“No more than a balmy breeze, ” she’d said
Amidst a sparky splashing bream.

“Go back to your boyhood island,
For there, it would surely rain, ”
But how to get my boyhood back?
I wailed and wailed and wailed in vain.


Now I want a steep hillock,
A place of which I often dream,
Now I do not mind at all,
To barter it with my dear stream.

All my friends were overwhelmed,
“Oh it’s a silly, stupid bargain,
A river in exchange of damned hill!
Is nothing but a bag of shame.”

They did not know that now,
My life has lost all the gloss,
To get the stream for the hill
Was no longer a heavy loss!

The hill would be steep and high,
With a forest at its base,
Which only I would cross,
In an edge-of-the-life race.

I would climb the rocky edge
To take me to the peak,
Blue sky within my palms,
Where confessions I’d seek.

I had my sins and conceits
My egos, cravings, greed
I’d kneel at the lonely cliff,
And forgiveness I’d plead.

I’d live there forever, alone
And I shall never die,
All my baggage left behind,
With no one around, but I.

13 Aug 15