Bengali Poetry (Translated)

The Color of Solitary Shame

You need not come if you would rather not;
just tell me, having loved yet never come close,
to what heaven has some ancestor departed?

Before the heat of wind stained with solitary shame
comes to its end, arrive.
You and I flowing in the unrestrained current of primal longing, come...

Breaking the chains of self-containment,
come before the day is spent.

I stuff a bone or two into the mouths of wild beasts;
then you and I sit at the altar of desire
with a thousand years of mastery... tearing down the walls between.

Let the unrisen clusters of love's heat return—
the body's unblinking flash of effortless flow.
Some in rapture, some in the play of fingers...
what the soul's radiance will gradually bring
is a torrent's swift motion toward the root.

Then gradually will flow away
some days, some nights
in kisses like and unlike...
in the hushed current of embrace.

Longing will grow more lover-stricken
in vital rapture, in sweat-moist desire.

At last, at the close of all watches,
in the half-light of dawn's early gleam,
we ourselves will discover—
digging through the body's mountain passes—
the blue-sky-awakened nectar of vastness...
the heart-churned sapphire of the blue lotus.
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