Canto!
A hand rises out of the dawn, the hand of the toiler of time, it is raised dipped in the Blood and sweat of human fields; it scatters sindoor to long shadows and distances.
I open my eyes and from my little window greet the birds and clouds, flying about in the air. I fling a sigh at them that all my dreams are only their wings. I share the loving gift of Sun, my day, with them.
I am born out of the grain, I live for the grain and dead I go back into the grain. I make Poems with molecules of sounds and like glasses Made out of particles of sand, lilt them into tunes.
With yarn which dreams of colours, weave saris to drape women of my country and Release them like butterflies in the meadows of Human life.
I make ships, launch them in the oceans, to carry and go flying my people’s flags:
I lay roads into dreams, I build mansions Into the clouds, with my life I raise massive walls On the frontiers of my country, high into the chest Of our enemies;
I give shapes, forms and voices to rocks and release them from silences. I plough all the Fields of human life; what beauty has I not Created with this hand! What thing on earth did Not surrender to this hand? But this hand has remained ever empty!
I had no place in bygone history and the Present history has no scruples. Why I build dams, Why I till lands, I do not know!
I live in zero, but I walk along. Man is the walking tree, whose roots have changed into legs. Had I remained a tree, I could have had A spring every year; having become a man, I have Lost all the springs on earth.
From my childhood, trees have been growing, roads have been walking, towns and villages have been jumping and dancing in joy, but I walk alone with empty hands in my country; where I have nothing of my own, only my memories to follow behind me, with myself as the leader of the procession and my burning red desire, flying as my flag-
* * *
Moments are not the retinue of time. There is one which decides the turning point of mankind.
I can’t hand over to sighs that time which stands and beckons me.
To hell with the shades to recline and chew the gum of past. Remember, the storms do not count for a life which strides with hills and shifts oceans; the fiercest storms blow off while Struggles of life flit around like flies.
Look! Drunk on pearls of sweat, the sun grows large and formidable bestows millions sickles and hammers of light.
In history where savage winds blow in cantos, I cannot be like the braches of trees that remain trembling in the hands Of unrelenting winds.
Do not query why so restless, ask the ocean why it is restless. Do not say why so furious; ask the hurricane for the answer.
Know, that time after all is my paper, upon which I write the Charter of my dreams for the world, sculpture a colossus of force Out of man;
my will, will shout and throw a new era on the earth- It shall confer unrest on man and
Flow like red-hot blood through all the roads of our villages and make him into a sea and into a tempestuous storm.
I shall gift that consciousness to my country with my four dimensional poems….
Now, centuries will speak the language, which I learnt in the wombs of forests; My word will be the legacy to future generations; my poems, only countries and nations deserve-
* * *
Last year's spring flowed away like a river; into which orchards it meandered and slept, I donot know-
But the spring returned, searching for the mango tree in the backyard of my house! Everything in the world is fleeting, yet keeps returning, searching for the beautiful. Behind the leaves in the branches I see footsteps of birds, marks of the moments which flew away last year. in my tired journey, my tavern is the shade of a tree, and the guest is the fallen flower.
This is spring, the year's first dream, in which I trudge my way on the body of my country like the dream that preludes the dawn, covering my nakedness forest, tying the rivers as my turbans, carrying my road on my shoulders.
.I walk, coaxing the fields that are crying; I walk, yearning to sculpture my country's hills that have waited for forms, into lions, into elephants and camels..Into workers, toilers, tillers, lovers and into epics that are like their crowns.
the sun is coming with loads of morning rays stacked on bullock carts! The tree that saw me first and shed tears, now rained flowers on my dream. 