My Country My People Modern Indian Epic -1
My Country My people Modern Indian Epic
Canto -1 , Poem - 1
A hand rises out of the dawn, the hand
of the toiler of time, it is raised dipped in the
Blood and sweat of human fields; it scatters sindoor
to long shadows and distances.
I open my eyes and from my little window
greet the birds and clouds, flying about in the air.
I fling a sigh at them that all my dreams
Are only their wings. I share the loving gift of
Sun, my day, with them
I am born out of the grain,
I live for the grain and dead I go back into the grain. I make
Poems with molecules of sounds and like glass
Made out of particles of sand, lilt them into tunes.
With yarn which dreams of colours, I
Weave saris to drape women of my country and
Release them like butterflies in the meadows of
Human life.
I make ships, launch them in the oceans,
To carry and go flying my people’s flags:
I lay roads into dreams, I build mansions
Into the clouds, with my life I raise massive walls
On the frontiers of my country, high into the chest
Of our enemies;
I give shapes, forms and voices to rocks
And release them from silences. I plough all the
Fields of human life; what beauty have I not
Created with this hand! What thing on earth did
Not surrender to this hand? But this hand has
Remained ever empty!
I had no place in bygone history and the
Present history has no scruples. Why I build dams,
Why I till lands, I do not know!
I live in zero, but I walk along. Man
Man is the walking tree, whose roots have changed
Into legs. Had I remained a tree, I could have had
A spring every year; having become a man, I have
Lost all the springs on earth.
From my childhood, trees have been
growing, roads have been walking, towns and
villages have been jumping and dancing in joy,
but I walk alone with empty hands in my country;
where I have nothing of my own, only my
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memories to follow behind me, with myself as the leader
of the procession and my burning
red desire, flying as my flag-
Seshendra Sharma
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