Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
such a bodiless beauty
that one form couldn’t contain it
she returns again and again
to different bodies
in disparate places, distinct times
sometimes helen sometimes cleopatra
sometimes carmen…
do not chase me, says marisha,
wait for me
i will come to your life on my own
desultory
like the fleeting winds of dawn
momentary
like gleaming dewdrops on flowers
i am a poet’s dream beyond touch;
sages saw me for the first time
in a rigvedic forest,
so soulful so seraphic
that there wasn’t even
any body
at all
NOTE
Nature’s nascent beauty, as experienced by Vedic sages, is conflated here with the mythic, abstract beauty of Marisha, daughter of sage Kandu and divine nymph Pramlocha. In Indian mythology, Marisha was born of nature and nurtured by it.
Excerpted from Witnesses of Remembrance: Selected Newer Poems, trans. Apurva Narain, Eka, Westland, 2021
KUNWAR NARAIN, TRANSLATED BY APURVA NARAIN