One Full-Grown Nishad

From ancient gramophone records, I speak as death…
Reading from scripts received in the birth-throes of bygone winds, the second volume of burnt clouds…
Then the sun's undeclared manifesto of destruction.
Today only the alluvial faith shall survive!

I am death, I have slept since birth, never left the soul's warm bed…
No, no respite for moistening lips with spit and laughing — I am not crippled!
Walking groundless on two feet... this ethic belongs only to nomad nights, to gross fog that wants to race across field after field at wind's speed... for it knows its feet are heavy with spectral lusts!

I am godlike, having slept through every life's entire past, present and future!
I am he who in anguished birth transformed into the poison-smeared taste of datura flowers! Who still remains with secret birds, in fragrant grass and the hymns of treasonous patriots, who walks watering the light of fireflies.

And so, even with closed eyes I was awake, like fish in water's depths, should the mood for hunting suddenly strike!
I danced endless tandava like lightning piercing sky, on the neck of earth's every curse…
Ah, what dreams Indrajit had!

I am eternal truth to the earth, to souls refined by virtue or tormented by sin, to brain and mind.
I am unpardonable sin in textbook indices, in every mathematical formula or human dictionary.
Then stitched into leather clothes I was born as thread in the conclusion; to become lord of lamenting green, with blood's warmth under my nails I emerged seeking my kinsmen's backs…
I want blood-soaked, oily naked backs, understand!?

Give me one cup of water, in exchange I'll bring civilization and culture's dangling heap of flesh!
I'll show you religion's ornament on irreligion's peeling-skinned body if you can give one handful of mustard seeds!
Touch my land's soil; you'll see how in flesh's humility the lungs have pressed right against the spine.

Hey my chain-smoking babu, why so frightened? Seeing this skeletal, misshapen body with lungs exposed!? Look, there's no smell of blood in my nose!
Taste my tears; see how coolly that water flows.
In veinless nails you'll find not the slightest trace of rotten flesh!
We peasants are lifelong vegetarians... though we'd promised to become collective farmers someday!

And the trees weep with sad beautiful eyes, the sea has died for refusing to accept lovelessness's legitimacy!
Meanwhile in bastard happiness, fleeing the arrival of legitimate children, runs the lemon-seed gigantic valiant man!
In the exuberant river's breath today one smells the scent of aging, terribly soured!

Listen, O newly arrived tender leaf, pawning those mournful breaths I speak as death…
From today no one will go to taverns, no body-conquering unloving one will quench thirst with wine-colored lips!
In lovely moonlight no social leader will sink teeth and spout logic in tea-sessions!
Raw dreams will no longer be crushed underfoot, even with a hundred scattered touches the flower-selling virgin girl's steady gaze won't stir.
Flowers will forget butterflies, for they are promiscuous!
Neither they nor any cuckoo will bathe in steam to purify themselves!
With fugitive valor men will walk no more in any full moon; if they do, render them harmless.
Hereditary bastard happiness from today will march against every mad night…
Who will object? You... you? Or is it you!?

Then the flock of leftover-eating crows will set up house with green, only then will the dead sea be born in love's waist!
Seeing this, trees will laugh once more before becoming coal.
Kisses hanging on lips' cornices will walk to the punished poet's house and poems will sprout one after another,
At this unexpected step the young bird strung on babul thorns will burn in the fire of golden shower flowers!
The power of lovelessness seems like wrong dialogue...

I swear, he who mixes coal with blood to make eternal ink,
Will write the story of how much the reclusive people are shattered in word-famine!
How lovelessness secretly slips letters into the beloved's fate and returns, leaving graceful women and fire-daughters in the folds of waves...!
The poet extinguishes fire with his touch, ascetic waves and conch shells lie in salt water, oysters forget that honor must be sacrificed for liberation, even that much!

Or humans forget the river's delicious funeral feast on sandbanks and barefoot hymns to the Lord trampling unfed children's bones!
The virgin doesn't understand how pure the ascetic baul is;
In meditation's trance, in happiness's burning his fingers become worldly, the ektara strings tighten and how the blood dances in pitiful appeal...
Alas, the spring girl seeks none of this!
The blame lies not with the ascetic baul, nor with the ektara or the virgin girl,
Only the finger's faded body will take this blame... ah, the terribly faded body flies overhead!

Death fears no fadedness, time or grace are ugly there, twin moons in virgin moonlight and black bees in full new moon... they too;
So I say, return to your own circle, don't strike my consciousness!
Let me sleep, let the endangered trees live, the widowed shadows and the punished poet!