My Country - My People: Modern Indian Epic - 1 Poem by Seshendra Sharma

My Country - My People: Modern Indian Epic
- - - - - - - - -
Canto - 1: Poem 2 & 3
- - - - - - - - - -



Moments are not the retinue of time. There is one which

decides the turning point of mankind. I can't hand over to sighs

that time which stands and beckons me. To hell with the shades

to recline and chew the gum of past.

Remember, the storms do not count for a life which strides

With hills and shifts oceans; the fiercest storms blow off while

Struggles of life flit around like flies.

Look! Drunk on pearls of sweat, the sun grows large

and formidable with millions sickles and hammers of light.

In history where savage winds blow in cantos, I cannot be

Like the braches of trees that remain trembling in the hands

Of unrelenting winds.

Do not query why so restless, ask the ocean why it is restless.

Do not say why so furious; ask the hurricane for the answer. Better

Know that time after all is my paper, upon which I write the

Charter of my dreams for the world, sculpture a colossus of force

Out of man; my will, will shout and throw a new era on the earth-

It shall confer unrest on man and

Flow like red-hot blood through all the roads of

Our villages and make him into a sea and into a tempestuous storm.

I shall gift that consciousness to my country with my four dimensional poems….

Now, centuries will speak the language, which I learnt in the wombs of forests;

My word will be the legacy to future generations;

my poems, only countries and nations deserve-

* * *

Last year's spring flowed away like a river;

into which orchards it meandered and slept, I do

not know-

But the spring returned, searching for the

mango tree in the backyard of my house! ..

Everything in the world is fleeting, yet keeps

returning, searching for the beautiful. Behind the

leaves in the branches I see footsteps of birds,

marks of the moments which flew away last year.

in my tired journey, my tavern is the shade of

a tree, and the guest is the fallen flower.

This is spring, the year's first dream, in which

I trudge my way on the body of my country

like the dream that preludes the dawn, covering

my nakedness forest, tying the rivers as my turbans,

carrying my road on my shoulders.

I walk, coaxing the fields that are crying;

I walk, yearning to sculpture my country's hills

that have waited for forms, into lions, into elephants and camels..

into workers, toilers, tillers, lovers and into epics that are like their crowns.

the sun is coming with loads of morning

rays stacked on bullock carts! The tree that saw

me first and shed tears, now rained flowers on my dream.