The Departed Nightingale Poem by Madathil Rajendran Nair

(This poem is a tribute to Madam Sugathakumari, Malayalam poet and an ardent environmentalist and advocate of women's rights. She passed away recently. Most, if not all, of the imagery in this poem belongs to her. I might have paraphrased.)

After nightlong rain*
the world stands in gloom.
The fallen tree
and the dead bird in the nest
are sobbing deep inside my heart.

That little girl in tatters
at the roadside
is awaiting her mom's return,
dead long ago
selling herself to the world.
She is looking at the Moon and stars
which man extends his hands
shamelessly to capture and own,
carrying the fire of hunger in her bowels,
to grow into a victim of flesh-hunters
in a morrow's nightmare.

A world without mother,
a world without father,
A world that has now lost
an elder sister to demand its rights,
although the night rain has ceased,
a world still wiping its tears.

There was a landslide last night -
the hut that disappeared in the mud,
the fallen tree,
the broken bamboo flute,
all ask 'Oh Krishna, where do you hide?
Don't you recognize
down here the wailing ones? '**

There beside them lay
a jungle bird that sang my tongue***,
extolled to the skies
as the fluent one,
as her name implies,
Nature's eternal beloved.

Like the moth that doesn't cease
to love the flames that burn her wings,
like a flower that selflessly offers
all her petals in passion's fervour
to the heartless tempest from the south,
infatuated with the eternal Infinite,
singing to It in full-thorated joy
without end,
our nightingale**** of poetic torrents.

Oh ye, chant the Gayatri mantra*****,
may the worlds she envisioned
flower and sway
like splendorous galaxies
that yonder up in the skies flourish.
__________________

*'Night Rain' is one of her celebrated poems.
**She wrote in Malayalam, my native tongue.
***'Krishna Don't You Know Me' is another famous poem by her.
****She has translated John Keat's 'Ode To A Nightingale' into Malayalam. The work is memorably sweet.
****A famous, popular, ancient Indian mantra that calls out to the Creator whose divine effulgence illumines all realms - physical, mental and spiritual - to stoke our intellect.