Camel-Bird

I

You hear me well: and yet you try

To hide within the desert's fold.

Here shadows shrink until they die,

While dead horizons cannot hold

The quick mirage, and, never near,

The cruel sky is mute and blue.

The hunter stalks no phantom deer;

He loses all by losing you.

The sands are heedless. Why run on,

When tell-tale footprints point your way?

Your prehistoric friends are gone,

And, all alone, you stand at bay.

u

By brooding on a broken egg

You cannot hatch or make it whole:

The self-consuming hunger's peg,

You play in void a dual role.

Become, instead, my wilful ark

Upon the chartless sea of sand;

For danger you refuse to mark,

Although you know the lie of land.

Come, let us seek a new retreat,

Enclosed in thorn and scorched all through,

Where water trickles, though not sweet;

The earth brings forth a date or two.

um

No wishful creeper shall I grow

To keep your iron cage concealed,

Nor call in hucksters who would know

What price your useless wings should yield.

With moulted feathers I shall make

A fan to suit the anchorite,

But out of fibrils never rake

The dust once raised by stars in flight.

My apprehensions shall prevail:

Your runic cry will not suborn:

For you are not the Nightingale

Who lulls to feed on mortgaged corn.

Iv

This ruin is our heritance:

A line of spendthrifts went before;

They picked the pounds, and left no pence:

Now both of us must pay their score.

And so your self-absorption seems

Inept: can blindness cheat a curse?

The present is no time for dreams:

By shunning me you make bad worse.

Let each of us then seal a bond

To serve the other's interest:

You speed me to the world beyond,

While I propose the human test.

Translated from the Bengali by the author