Days And Nights Poem by Samarendranath Mahapatra

Day after day,
every day is a day of death
Night after night,
every night is one of grief.

I pack all the darkness
into a pillow case
and hold it close to my breast.
I let out sighs, deep and sombre
on someone's battered chest
far away from my oozing dreams.

I finish my sunbath,
on my way back I continually meet
a procession of shadows
corpses made of bones roll on the sea shore.

Days burn out in the heat of the dailies,
amidst the rape of reality, perspiring dreams
the soul cries out.

Who will listen to those
melancholic strains?
Neither a violin, nor a flute
not even a shehnai.

It is the sound of despair
pouring as ever on the debris of life.

Translated from original Odia by Rohini K. Mukherjee