I Want To See Poem by Rati Saxena

I want to see
All those places I had shelved for later
I want to see them
right away
I don't want to click any photograph
I no longer believe in photographs
my eyes can refuse to see them
any moment, any day
so the best place is just the heart
Now that the eyes are mentioned
I must speak of them too
I have always felt that the two eyes
must have been the first one to grow on my body
followed by hands and feet
Every time when I have praised myself in the mirror
I have seen but only my eyes
Kohl has been their oldest companion
even at the time when one of the eyes had a hemorrhage
It was these eyes that people praised
It was these eyes that pined for travel
It was these eyes that infiltrated into everything
It was these eyes that found the world in black alphabets


Yesterday my brother phoned me from Baluchistan
the brother who looks dashing in his pathani garb
the brother whose colloquial Urdu made my heart feel grounded
abroad
That brother, who didn't have light in his big eyes
but had refined nectar in his voice
His gazals in an elevated voice
spellbound the audience in the last row
That brother records his gazals
and sends them to me
I understand his Baluchi gazals
and he listens to my poetry
This means now we must take off the verb ‘seeing' from the
verse
‘reading' even more so
although I want to read quite a bit between all this
These eyes taught me to drink stories
after stories while lying in a corner of the house
These very eyes have also taught me to grow
some new story from those stories
These eyes seperated me from the crowd
They united me with the crowd
'Crow, don't eat two eyes...'
Crow loves only two eyes
And I love eyes without the body

Even though I have written it earlier
that my body and my substance are one
but the absence of eyes in the body
splits us both apart
I want to see all that
I wanted to see all these years
and I have even seen since

Translated by Shelly Bhoil