Issue: Vol. IV, No. 3, November-January, 2025-26
Graphiti
The answers to every question
Lie right inside the room
Think with your eyes
Move round and round reversely
The trees that stand by the pond
Aren’t alone
Though they’re unable to utter a word
This isn’t a statement too
The drops can’t moisten
The bodies of grasses and weeds
Still rain keeps pouring
Upon that bend in the road
Evening
Descends silently
Nowadays the universe grows visible
Only when dogs open their mouths
Why are they so displeased
So disgusted
That they rend the sky in sheer desperation
I move away
Leaving the windows hanging outside
I’ve a mirror of my own
In this way too a situation is created
Crestfallen and displaced
How could it be named
Or is it only an eye within an eye
An eye
Within an eye
By swinging in midst
One can’t be a witness
Of the last meeting too
And good cooks and leftovers are poles apart
At times
A creation springs out from an oddity
At a sky-high altitude a house remains floating
Keeps quivering
Nothing transpires as proclaimed
With tones high and low the tempos remain in tandem
All together
This journey is in quest of the soul’s mount
Through personal occurrences events come to the fore
While moving around the exterior
There’s the sensation of going inside
The headway is made ahead
To a place
Without an entity within its entity
When the aim is insubstantial
The feelings blend
The old patch of wound relapses
From wherein emerge the birds
They run helter-skelter
Fresh flowers bloom only in arid soil
The apparently major events
Of ecology
Lose significance
At one’s own household one has to be a fugitive
At times someone
Seeks to remain alone
The house keeps quaking in terror
The world descends to a tumult
And could split apart
Translated by Krishna Dulal Braua
Kaushik Baiswas is a young Assamese poet who is presently working as a senior resident in Department of Radiation Oncology, AMCH. He has published two collections of poems Babari Bilas and Ei Batahkhinikei Dilo.
Krishna Dulal Barua is a prominent translator and writer based in Nagaon, Assam. He received the Katha Award for translation in 2005.