I Also Poem by Bishnu Dey

I also yearn for rain-clouds, not just with my eyes,
but with all my heart;
the lament of parched burnt earth brings to my nerves also
a feeling of deathly famine,
it introduces in me a thousand cracks like those
on a cobra,
the sun's malicious heat has cracked my albal too.
I have seen men gaze, the earth gaze uninterrupted
at that dusty vicious sky,
for even today this soil and the thousand-eyed sky
predominate life.
Day and night I also have wanted the flow
of rainwater.

So today I listen to this pleasant rain
that turns durba grass green,
I watch it, I breathe it in as it wets my skin,
inwardly I also work and plant this burnt field
that is my being,
I turn into trembling ears of grain.
In my nerves also today's ashar of the soil
convolves into a monsoon festival,
it floods my heart, it flows in spate;
I string these pearl-beads and let that beauty
fill my consciousness,
I put them around her neck whose arm
is around mine.

The darkness of my body is a cloudy song,
those intense rays a hymn to sunrise and sunsets.

My newly-sprouted poems also sway in that
satisfied breeze
like imminent Ashwin rice-flowers.