Issue: Vol. IV, No. 3, November-January, 2025-26
Agony of Voicelessness
Piercing the heart of the Bodhidruma
The ethical practice of divine words
Sob in the solitude.
I keep on observing
I keep on listening
With the guilt of my inability to do anything
With the haemorrhage in my cerebrum
With a handful of conscience
The doors of the seven jails open
The mute are at fault
Utterances amplify the faults.
As a milch cow shying away
The common masses
Choose their stands.
The moorage is the same
The ropes for drawing out water vary
Water too has its taste of sweetness and bitterness
Slipping back again and again
The people slump on the poverty-line.
Losing the hands and voices
In the solitude
The divine words sob silently
Eyeing their pitiful plight.
Frontier lost in Infinity
The frontier is lost in infinity
You’re unable to draw fixedly
The protective demarcating line of life
Indefinite unhindered
Is the motion of life
The war-horn of mortal time
Sounds solitarily
The prime of youth of the possessed midday
Utter the name in a trice
Of some lifeless meteorite
Straying away from the orbit
I too had a life of my own
Pouring the blood of the body
Breaking the rocks
Life sprouted
The rocks provided shelter
With my hands outstretched I’d saved for you
An impoverished fund
Of the green grace of assets
I haven’t been able to understand till today
Who is selfish — you or is it time
When you bathe
In the river of blood
By slitting the veins of my neck
The dead stars dig graves
For your burial too
The boundary-line of infinity
Gets lost there itself again and again
Translated by Krishna Dulal Barua
Renu Bhuyan is an Assamese poet based in Doomdooma, Tinsukia, Assam. She has published one collection of poems.
Krishna Dulal Barua is a prominent translator and writer based in Nagaon, Assam. He received the Katha Award for translation in 2005.