Contemporary Literary Review India | eISSN 2394-6075 | Vol 6, No 4: CLRI November 2019
Poem by Dr. Sapna Dogra (Translation of Mujhe Kadam Kadam Par)
At Every Step of Mine1
At every step
I come across crossroads
With arms wide open!!
Innumerable paths sprout up
At every step of mine,
And I desire to traverse through all of those;
There’s a merit in the experiences they offer,
There’s a credibility in all my dreams;
An inexplicable uneasiness emerges within me
That makes me go seek the deeps in the hope
That I might find something there!!
I have a misconception that:
In every stone lies a sparkly diamond,
Inside every chest is a vehement soul,
In every visage is perennial cheerfulness,
I have a misconception that in every articulation
lies pain of epic proportion,
I desire to traverse through all of these in a single moment
I want to go through each heart,
In this way, I move around offering myself to others,
Life is indeed weird!!!
I move around offering myself to others
In order to be fooled eventually;
And it is great fun to watch
That I have been tricked. . .
Inside the depth of my heart
Sits a happy fool,
Who laughs,
Laughing tearfully, it gets passionate,
And gets lost in the universe.
After taking away from me stories and
After giving me something, these crossroads spread
Wherever I stand to converse. . .
. . .I find novels.
Stories of grief, variety of complaints,
Ego analysis, character sketches,
I get to hear about the holy verses.
Poetry reprimands me and
Talks to me lovingly
Burning ladders of death and life
are revered!!
When I return home
Bringing scared signs and smiling character sketches. . .
Similies say, the moment I enter the house, that
“You ought to live a hundred years”.
Even at home, at every step I find crossroads,
Every day I come across a hundred paths
with arms wide open,
Branches and sub-branches keep emerging
I come across hundreds of novel topics every day.
And, I was thinking
That the difficulty of today’s writer is not
That there’s a dearth of topics
But there are excess of these
And, He is unable to make
The right choice.
1Muktibodh, Gajanan Madhav. “Mujhe Kadam Kadam Par” from Chand Ka Munh Tedha Hai. New Delhi: Bharatiya Gyanpeeth, 20th edition 2015