Bengali Poetry (Translated)

Where There Are No Flags

I walk with small steps, slowly;
yet with each step I cross thousands of moments.

Though I walk with eyes open, carefully watching,
still with each dawn thousands of years slip away.

I need a place to dwell,
a place with no flag.
I need no rival to keep history in my name.
I need no religion to believe in.
No philosophy to think with.
I don't want to live as science's slave, even for my own survival.
I can do without wealth to show off, or a ruler
on whose shoulders I can place all my burdens and remain unburdened.

I need a place to dwell,
I need no place to keep things.
To stay alive I need a world,
I need a shadow to walk touching the shore,
I need a horizon to find my way back,
For sharing with someone, for tending my children and dreams,
I need a home where, living and fighting time itself,
I can keep love intact.

To keep myself calm, to console myself...
To whisper fairy tales, myths,
songs or poems to my own ears as I please,
I claim the right to a fearless voice.
In all that I have seen until now,
whatever has caused me pain
and drowned me in loneliness and despair,
urged me again and again to leave this world,
taught me to abandon everything and vanish somewhere far away,
...living through all this, I have come to understand:
there is nowhere to hide oneself for a lifetime,
nothing exists anywhere that compels us
to hold on or let go or forget.

There is no day, no place, no step, no moment
—that can be hidden.
With each step I cross a thousand years.
Each moment seems to bring news of my last chance.

I must learn the way to pierce the veil of infinite sorrow,
find the path to push away this world's infinite night of boundless ignorance.
There is no point anywhere that can be held or must be held;
everything vanishes in the blink of an eye like lightning's swiftest flash!

Whatever shackles these two feet,
to free myself from it
I will murder with my own hands
some habits, some beliefs, some conventions.

I live in a world of lies,
waste my life carrying illusions and magic spells,
quench my thirst drinking the poison of selfishness.
And I do this, keep doing this,
only to compete with the petty people around me.

Nothing in this world belongs to me,
I myself don't belong to this world...
where I am alive...
I don't really know this place,
this place is not mine at all, because
nothing exists here of what I want to be, how I want to live.
I am merely a visitor here.
Even my dwelling place remains a mystery to me.

There is nowhere to hide,
no corner of the world where one can live in hope...
Today this world is on fire,
everything burns in the fire
of clamor, false desires and needless wants.
Even in the tiniest insignificant regions of this world
there is constant carnival of fear, blood and countless deaths,
blessed by science, under the relentless blows of compressed time and space,
everywhere only misery and tears,
and the despair-stricken consequences of millions of moments...

The whole world is a trap! Caught in that trap
my entire body today is like a broken map,
my stories too are of traps, my dreams of delusion;
my fears, my beliefs imprison me for eternity
in that safe chamber I built myself to hide in.

But now I know
there is no place anywhere in this world
where one can hide even from oneself...
not even a point from where
one can conceal oneself forever...

I need a place to dwell
that has no flag.

To free myself I need a path
I am walking in search of...

Very slowly, taking my time, I walk...
yet with each step there spreads around me
the sound of a thousand eternal footfalls.
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