Poetry Here & Now: Basudev Adhikari/ April-May 2015

 

1)

Arrived in Paris once more

Monalisa

Mona Lisa

I arrived again in Paris

To see you

To pour all my jovial smiles

You are unrestrained and expansive, vast like a sea

I hope you will smile more this time

The still sea though seeming quiet

Is stirring up

In a tide

And foaming

But you cannot be like this

You are likened to the memory raining my heart

Or like the ephemeral light of lightening

They close in and peter out

Smile and get vexed

But you stay unconcerned

Neither smiling more nor getting more irate, un-stirred

Why are you staring at me?

Do you think I am wayward?

To stir the creative mind

Do you think I am over- smart?

Or you are looking intently on my inner fire

The song of the age.

 

 

 

 

2)

With the girl of the Annam road

Monalisa

I have not come to steal prosperity

Nor to mislead you

I have come to smell the prosperity of Paris

To see the development of Paris

And to behold the beauty of it

To talk to Mona Lisa

 

Why are you fleeing from me?

 

I am not an Englishman

I have with difficulty learned a little English

(I always speak Nepali)

 

I lost the way

That compelled me to ask you

I have already told you

I have not come to mislead you

 

I have not come to litter your path

I have not come to assassinate the kernel of your language

(such people come to our country)

Why are you running away from me?

Why are you quiet?

Why are you grumbling?

And unremittingly staring at me?

 

 

 

 

3)

The tree and young lady

Monalisa

When the autumn keeps on passing

When the leaves are falling

The trees are getting stripped

But the young ones are covering up

 

Just the reverse

The spring is approaching

The leaves are growing

The trees are branching out

Those birds migrating somewhere

Singing song

They come to taste old love

 

But ladies are shedding

Their dress

Stripping themselves

Why they are doing this?

Cannot nature make less naked both of them?

 

 

 

 

4)

With the wind of Paris

Monalisa

You are storming from afar

And drumming my ear

But you are keeping all from me

Why are only beating my ear

Awestruck

I am watching Paris

And seeing a spot that meets triangular paths

And Eiffel Tower and Lubre being intently watched

 

You want me to thank you?

Or you are going to tell me an old story

Or you want to scold me as a little lad of a small country?

When you are creeping up to the ear

You must say clearly

Why are you boxing my ear and

Penetrating deeper

When I get closer to Paris

I have conned the spirit of your Renaissance

I have smelled the pollen grain of the Vinci garden in Kathmandu

What will you tell me?

The story of your romance?

The wound of the Euro debt?

Or do you think

And the end of our stalemate and uncertainty

Or the finale of our negative force

Or you are frightened?

Seeing inside me the volcanic energy of a New Nepal?

 

 

 

 

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