Cooking Poem by Kanishka SricharanPratap

See, hanging:
Many awards
Certificates
In my house!
I cook very nice!

In a handful of herb
Half Kg. salt
Two hundred grams soda
Eight hundred grams chilli
Sixty-four bay-leaf
A cup of asafoetida
I add,
And season first
With ten ladle of mastwood oil.

The feelings
Words... style
Images...
I roast... dry under sunlight
Stitch
And mix in it,
I cultivate and cultivate...
Cultivate literature!


Translation from Odia by
Subash Chandra Mohapatra