‘Love is so short , but forgetting is so long’ -
Neruda

Stranger

In your sacred dome, I am only a stranger
In the city where your holy blood drained,
I, the half naked, rush ahead
Carrying the wild seeds of incest.
In the census of memories
Let the trumpet of stranger reverberate.
The parched dry wombs,
Justice which lost the shining head,
I am burning up an olive to declare all aimless wars

In the grimace of deserted amphitheatres
You may not see my face

Among the generations which loose strands after
Your last supper,
I am only a red bearded
Who pawns the thirty silvers at the brothel.

Let this rendezvous
Fill in our memories dark flames of oblivion.

With in me lies the scorching Naplam who burnt and stripped her,
Also the annihilation of cluster bombs;
The hemlock which drops onto the eternal springs.
I deepened my fangs on her
Who complained like a mother
about the lost brightness in my eyes.

I am seeking the citadel of sins and also
Blossoms of blood
I sing the psalms of sins in the dry memoirs
And prepare the sacrificial dinner of sin on her who
sleeps hearing bedtime stories .
I am the one who
Nipped a thousand buds before the holy birth;
The neo thalidomide of this century.

Still then you are not recollecting me
Am I such stranger to you!

During dark nights
I groan along with the howling wolves

Let me go
To raze down all the burning lights of this city
Then to find my place
In this city of never ending frenzy.







This poem was a chance discovery while I were in home. I had decided to compile together all my earlier writings. It was not at all an easy task. Spread across unhinged pieces of flings of paper , my earlier words had already declared independence and gone hiding. I had written only in Malayalam those days, and my plan was to translate them to English and post in blog to carry on for further days during the draught of words. Certainly the main source of inspiration has deserted me or rather I want to move away from the source.

A random thought: When you bid bye to your home and travel ahead , don’t you feel it is your home which deserts you(although the truth is vice versa)

I wanted to keep with me a nice reserve of poems to update my blog, though it violated the purpose of keeping my Blog as a diary. We must be flexible enough to change definitions and move ahead unhindered, not tethered by any ideological shackles!!!
But my words were intelligent than me , they kept on struggling in hiding , never came to my sight and only one poem born 5 years back surrendered before me , and that was this above stranger.
I believe I wrote this for my Hostel literary competition. Those days I was too much under the influence of Chullikkaad( seriously it was an addiction!) and naturally many overtones of my words stroke a semblance with that perspective.

And then it started, my endeavor of translation. Firstly I wanted to recapture the mood while writing it. I pondered over the lines again and identify it. Usual haunting of mine- the picture of Kim Phuk the Vietnam girl running naked out of a napalm bombing. Entangled with it was my nihilist attitude of those days intermingled with the mood of guilty feeling.One thing I noted was the reference to biblical themes juxtaposed with the modern world.

As it is told sometimes ‘ Poem is what it lost in translation’

To give an effect in Malayalam I had provided a structure suited to recite , but while translating it to English I found it hard to maintain that tempo.
And what resulted was this poem in English. I am posting it anyway. It looks disfigured and amputated to me, still!!!