Jayanta Mahapatra, "More in Dreams than in the Flesh"

 No wind. No storm.
Just the trees heaving in their own sorrow.
The girl next door who went missing a week ago
Has come back; the faces of her parents stare
Like bare, wounded hills beyond the river.
Often a dream makes one afraid
Of the things one might do. It frightens one
That despair seems to have no boundaries.
The laments for a death are over while death
Is warm and safe and drifts into sleep
In a child’s dream.

Some time back I had stumbled
On the decomposing bodies of a young couple
On the hill slope behind the temple. The girl
Couldn’t have been more than sixteen years old.
I had made a great effort to defend myself.
Her half-open eyes now wander through
My subdued Sunday mornings as though testing
The courage it took to be a man.

No wind. No storm.
Just the vague light of daybreak
Coming down from the hilltops.
An unknown darkening is in my breath.
And I knew death is born to us in the same way
As when we cast our nets into the night
And draw in the shapes of day.


Jayanta Mahapatra