Let Us Spend The Night In The Villages Poem by Unnikrishnan Sivasankara Menon
Let Us Spend The Night In The Villages
In the village of Ichinono
a tiny, depopulated
rural Japanese village
puppets outnumber humans;
most of the sixty residents there
are past their retirement age;
the younger have moved out
for education or employment;
no child was born in village
for the past twenty years or so;
the puppets made by the residents
but, make their life less lonely.
He told her, 'Come, my beloved,
let us go to the countryside;
let us spend the night
among the wildflowers.
Let us go early to the vineyards
to see if the vine has budded,
if the blossom has opened,
there I will give you my love.'*
And to Rie Kato and Toshiki
who moved there from Osaka,
the first child was born
in twenty years in Ichinono.
Note: *Song of Solomon 7: 11
1) From every village anywhere in the world, young people migrate to cities for better education and employment opportunities. My village Puthenchira is not different. About 10% of the houses lie vacant here..
This is a brilliant verse. Just how neglected a community becomes is captured in such a prodound way--the puppets. We have a human form, but not the life. This is an image simultaneously devastating and somehow uplifting. Brilliant!
Thank you, poet Mr M.J. Lemon. That Man is mere puppet in the hands of his wishes is an old saying, modified. But he needs to take new decisions bowing down to his conscience
6) But, now most villages are asylums of the old
5) Mahatma Gandhi said ‘India lives in its villages'. ‘India is not Calcutta and Bombay; India lives in her seven hundred thousand villages'.
4) Puthenchira is marching towards becoming another Ichinono. It will be, soon. My wife and I are considered mad couple, who lived in cities for 40 years only to return here in the old age
3) In another 40% of the houses live just an old couple or older single person. No baby was born is in many of these houses for the past decade or so
This poem has not been translated into any other language yet.
I would like to translate this poem
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8/29/2026 11:21:43 PM # rel_20260827T145718Z_a0f1bd3
2) Houses that were built with meticulous planning and choice of materials, with love and passion are abandoned by their owners, in some cases permanently