Left-over / Satchi

When do you grow old?

When a twenty-year old fall, bellowing
Trains its horns on your spine
You grow old

When a thirty-year old love affair, howling,
Sinks its teeth on your heart
You grow old

When a forty -year old rebuke, barking,
Leaps into your dreams
You grow old

When a fifty-year old death of a playmate, trumpeting
Crushes your brow
 You grow old

When a sixty-year old nightmare. raising its hood
Slithers towards you
 You grow old

When in summer you begin to pray for winter
And in winter for summer
And in neither for childhood
You grow old

When history begins to startle you more than does news
When waves seem to have ceased In the sea of questions
And future seems a desolate burnt-down city,
You grow old

Most of us are no more than
The nostalgia of ghosts.
Only some have a little life left in us,
 Like the small change left In a robbed home,
 Like the little reason left In a lunatic’s gibberish,
 Like the solitary seed left In a burnt-out forest.

K.Satchidanandan (Left-over)

( Translated from  Malayalam by the poet )

In Memory of a Swedish Evening/Satchi

(To Lars Lundquist)


With steady hands

you went on pouring the

ruddy autumn in my goblet.



You read your poems

bright like the maple leaves,

filling the air like a Brahms symphony,

-sipping one mouthful for each line.



I translated your birds and trees into

my birds and trees.



Nouns revealed their core.

Verbs were inert.



There was a meadow

in your coat pocket.

I called out to the Western Ghats,

as if it were a hungry sheep.



The wind was turning

the pages of an apple tree.

I inhaled my childhood.



As I looked on

you turned into a green train.

I boarded it and  whistled like the rain.

We left behind the church of  the chill.

Words rubbed against words.