Yours is the face I saw in a procession.
All day
I searched for you
and then at dusk I found you
sitting in my home
resplendent
beside the lamp.
Refusing me all day
you held me close at night.
In that terrible heat
I found no shade anywhere;
the blue seas had all dried up
I rub my eyes.
Did I see you in my dreams?
Or are you mere illusion?
Hold me close in your arms
let the frozen tears
of my heart
melt.
Give my love a place to be born
while I
tie the strings
in the bow of bate.
The day is over.
Yet you do not come,
with a cry of anguish
to darken the world.
For this perhaps
enraged thunder
rents the sky
during storm.
In the distant horizon
someone listening to us
saddles a horse of many colours
Your stand brilliant
as I walk on the brink of darkness,
to usher in the red day.
Subhas Mukhopadhyay
(Translated from the original Bengali by Pritish Nandy)