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Seshendra Sharma
Poet, Critic, Scholar. A
trend setter in poetry and criticism, occupies a place of crucial
importance in the development and evolution of Modern Indian Literature.
Author of Modern Epics like 'My Country, My People', 'Adhunik
Mahabharatam', 'Janavamsham', 'Rakta Rekha', 'Kaala Rekha', 'Poet's
Notebooks', 'Tantrik Commentary on 'Ramayana' 'Shodasi', 'Swarna Hamsa',
etcetera and short stories, plays, novelette, critical essays etc. Has
authored more than 50 books which are translated into various Indian and
foreign languages.
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My Country My People
Canto 1
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 glass
made out of particles of sand, lilt them into tunes.
With yarn which
dreams of colours, I 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 builed mansions into the clouds, with my life I
raise massive walls on the frontiers of my country, high into the chests
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
have 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 donot know!
I live in a 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 moment that
decides the turning point of mankind.
I cannot bury myself
in stoic silence of inaction; I cannot hand over to sighs that time which
stands and beckons me.
Remember the storms do not count for a life,
which strides with hills and shifts with oceans; fiercest storms blow off,
while struggles of life flit around like flies.
Look, drunk on the
liquor of sweat the sun grows large and formidable.
Bestows a million
sickles and hammers of light.
In history, where savage winds blow in
cantos, I cannot be like the branches 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 tempest for
an 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, shall shout and break the spine of Time, tear off the
horizons and throw a new era on 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 do
not 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 the 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 with my country's forests, 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.
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