HOUSES WITHIN A HOME

(Translated by Kumud Bhansali)

Two houses live within my home like two branches sprawling one to east the other to west Nature dispatched a long dossier to our address this year. Stunned I am remember? the seed planted with mutuality with love. One house grows taller new pillar added to its western face Roofs refurbished coats of new paint mark weddings, feasts, festivals

plants fed on fertilizers, courtiers tend gardens collect salaries months after months in return, you get New Year’s tokens And, in this way a small civilization grows (indeed, this house oozes pragmatism) In the other house dead wood decays and what is alive lives and grows tall wrapped in the unkempt leafy embraces of wild creepers. The house, returning to its wild, letting birds peck birdlings grow in its nests. With thunderstorms, one more layer of dust piles With rain, water seeps deepest into its veins And when the winter hits, freezing Sireto roam wildly from chimney to its very foundations Speaks the house, wisely: I have lived my life keeping it alive forged kinship of light with the sun,

of dreams with the moon made friends with the wild honey bees that live on the cliff and tasted sweetest honey made friends with the darkest of the nights and heard quietest of the quiet hours Come, my friend, roam around my rooms my corridors when the third hour of this moonless night strucks You will see history of one century striding in my fields stars of a thousand millennia twinkling in my sky Speaks the house again: Startle not, dear poet, I am your home within you embrace me And one day You will have a reunion with your very self caught in the cage perched on the shelf in the corner of my tiny bedroom.