Having steadily put Losar, 1 Baisakh and Bhintuna behind us, we have now arrived at the last new years of the year-and let us hope it marks a change in our fortunes; for the past year, by any calendar's mark, has been singularly destructive.
Shailendra Sakar's poems have the emotional gravity and intellectual weight-as well as elegance-to make us feel by turns unstrung and incensed about the rush of time that leaves us all behind. The first poem below matches today's mood, though it was, like the poem that follows it, published in 1990 in Sakar's poetry collection Sarpaharu Geet Gaundainan.
NEW YEAR
This new year too in those same eyes
the same stamp of theatricality
I wanted to learn and I'm going to see
each moment of time passing by a unit of time
I wanted to understand and I'm going to hold onto
the melting snow mountain of lifespan
How will the sun place its strange footsteps
in people's eyes
How will it recall its own presence?
I wanted to touch each face of time as it passed
I truly felt greedy to see the face of the coming day
room wall street fetid alleyways
in the papers in shops the premonition of coming days
eager to learn who's hammering relentlessly at the granite of time
Shattering shattering will it then emerge
in a whole new form?
Who's shaking the tree of time to drop the bodhi seeds
New years
Ripping up and tossing away those same days opening those
same peels
unclosing those same pupa breaking those same mirrors
standing at the door wiping those same mouths-aspirations on loan
the butterfly comes in season books in time night and day in time
the butterfly comes in season casting off pupa
A new day has come through the back door-a new year
Without my knowledge its sunlight has reached my bed
Even as I close the window
as I go on strike as I refuse
without my knowledge someone's opened the back door of
the room of unawareness of the semi-awareness wrapped over
the brain
the day has entered like a thief like a wrongdoer
I'm not ready to accept it
How greedy am I how eager?
Still, somehow, suddenly they keep arriving-
each new year being forced upon us
The second poem is a simpler meditation on the same theme: our inability to control roguish time.
TIME
Hanging an x-ray of a friend's fractured hand
like a frame in the center of a room's clean wall
I look at it and see an illusion-
It's a carved lattice window
It's possible to see the open sky through it
If I examine the x-ray against bright lights
I'll see in it broken, bent and shattered bones
scattered so that they can't be joined
Otherwise, glancing quickly-
It's a design for an attractive window
Like this x-ray time is hanging
all over the clean wall of my life
Meditating upon impermanence-or just feeling it acutely-is said to motivate us to make the most of every moment of our short time on earth. Perhaps our decision-makers should read Sakar's poems in the original Nepali? .And allow us to have a constructive new year.
