Poems: The Seasons Have Passed

 

Originally written in Balochi by: Chandan Sach

Translated into English by: Uzair Mehr

 

 

1.    The Man Standing on The Last Step of Stairway

 

The lamps were quiescing in the pusillanimous bosom of the darkness.

I didn't sprinkle the ashes of contemplation's fire and moved away.

The matured fantasies of the consciousness were unleashing along

with the inebriated seasons.

It is the mat of life's rumination.

The earth doesn't take tender revelations on itself here.

The eyes of tales of an epoch were musing

and the leaves of life were incessantly falling.

Beside the intoxicant embers of this tale,

I, the aged philosopher,

kept telling the stories of God's customs,

walking on a gloomy path.

O' God!

I don't know how many hosts have fared before me

and communed with the unknown moments of life.

I, the aged philosopher, have been perished

by the vistas before me.

I washed the eyes of strangeness in moonlight,

the colors of my dress will always be

green at night.

 

**

 

 

2.    The Season of Separation

 

In which fire should I suckle myself now?

The deceptions of an age congealed the frozen sins.

If there was a boat, the voyage would be a sea,

A bird should have taken life in its beak.

If only/ I wish I could come again for you.

It's not possible too.

The moments of uncertainty made me like this.

A journey of an age passed with the embers of the pathway.

~ Shay Mureed doesn't want to cry.

Bring the intoxicant drinks of inebriation.

I have brimmed with sorrows

and strangle these lewd eyes now.

I have not kissed the spirit of fields

and lips of cold breeze cursorily.

Neither have I played on the red cheeks of gloaming,

nor the smiles of twilight deluded this heart of mine.

The flowers didn't recite ~ Fatihah on the green windowsills.

I wanted the interpretations of dreams from the sea

and ended the arduous journey.

Don't bother to return.

The seasons are sore within me, now.

The aged desires of youth are lying under the shade of a Neem tree

at the doorway of my house.

 

**

 

 

3.    The Vagabond Character

 

I possess such a disposition

What the populace thinks and means about me.

My nature is like the painted portraits of Picasso.

Here, the meaning can be taken

beyond the scale of interpretation.

I strip the dresses of thousands of seasons of a life's moment.

I bring the sea in my room and make it sleep.

I make the birds chant and sit playing on the flowers.

There is winter inside me and a hellish thirst outside.

Let me walk on the fires.

I have lost an age ruining myself.

I have nothing to do with the AIDS patients of these unknown brothels of your town.

My feet never galvanized me for the shopping malls,

high hotels and parks of your cities

for looking and meeting the tarty damsels.

I don't care about these ideals and customs of yours.

I am not a black snake which molts its skin

and gets young every time.

I want to taste the pleasure of life but once

and want to die after death.

The season halted at the threshold of my house,

come overhead my grave,

and cry on my name.

 

**

 

4.    The Seasons Have Passed

 

~ Hani, those seasons have passed now.

The sun and stars are not beguiling like before now,

let alone the moon.

The story reaches this street and recedes.

Hani, you look at the sea, which is lost like us,

the traveler in the jungle of life.

Who will come out of this jungle?

The mirror will turn blind in the back.

Hani, this sea is not watchable.

If I am seventy-seven oceans across,

I will hardly come for myself.

The seasons will perish,

and the moon will be hit by the mow again.

Hani, ponder about these boats.

You tell yourself

in which age one should string up his love.

Hani, the horses of our memories have aged

like the old memories.

Let's be a snake or a camel to be passed

through buttonholes.

Hani, those seasons have passed now.

The greenish pigeons of ~ Mecca are sitting

apart strangers from themselves,

the dreams further need no indicants for watching.

 

**

 

 

5.    The Regress of My Soul

Where will these dreams lead us to?

How will these tormenting times and moments move?

The broken eyes of the melancholic streets

don't see themselves a bit.

Who will ask the oceanic birds now?

The mirror of life is prone.

 

O' God!

I don't see myself with the life in the background of these dreams.

O' God!

These stars and moon are widows

with black apparels, the paths are widows.

O' God!

I am enamored with life

And enamored folks are wearing yellow amulets.

O' God!

When will these boats reach the sky and diverge?

O' God!

The lebbek tree of our balcony is leafless now.

I am conceiving to migrate from here and come to you.

 

**

 

 

6. The Companion

 

See the emblems of this sky,

the traces of our bygone time are left out.

To whom will ask the life of earth and seasons?

Move an iota from yourself,

hang the scenes of the sea in front of a window

and tell the crazy child of your inside,

go and see

that how time passes,

how the cherished beloveds separate,

how the play of boats' life reaches to an end,

how the roses wither

and the eyes of butterflies turn gradually close

in the grief of old age.

How the loved ones forget the people from their hearts,

how I am separated from my foregone seasons,

neither the deceased lips of embers' buds cease to tremble

nor the crying time and moment repose

on which old Neem tree of a mausoleum and shrine

I will put the holy broken verses of my hands,

the tears of strangeness yet sometimes trickle down.

Tell that

the sky is no longer the previous sky now.

Tell that

the gifted lamps of God grew old by excessive shimmering now.

 

**

 

7.    7. The Circumstance

 

O' God!

The colors of the earth and life have changed,

or are they still like that?

Why should I fall into this trouble?

I have been with myself for an era,

an era segregated from myself.

I have devoured all the dreams of strangeness.

It's not weird for me,

this life is a tale of unidentified seasons

and in the season of tales,

the earth and life will hush.

Where?

In dark rooms or in the association of melancholic

crying of a desert.

O' God!

My complaints have set out for committing suicide

for watching the inebriated seasons of another land.

O' God,

I wrote two words for you on a ring.

Keep the vigor, the fire is yet aflame.

 

**

 

 

8.    8. The Pursuit

 

My solitude has no patronage.

I exist myself.

My existence itself bestows me with a trouble.

I am a memory trapped in the impediments.

The midnight is tumultuous in every pace here.

The darkness is the calamity of life

to whom will I pin the blame of the quest.

Here is the revolution of avarice in every sight.

I didn't know the dreams needed guidance.

The paths of defeated pleasures will change.

I get entangled with myself every day.

Where will I explore a spiritual world?

I never desired for a revelation,

therefore, I don't look at the sky.

The ephemeral story of this God gifted distrustful

life expires.

 

**

 

 

9.    9. The Alien

 

O' the foreign alien,

get out of space,

don't complain of this cosmos.

The world is a hell.

The fantasy is a deposit of a whim.

This galaxy is an untrodden road.

Don't think in solitude.

There are a thousand dead stories.

It is not the custom of God.

Don't look like that.

This nature doesn't have an identification.

O' the foreign alien,

don't do like that for you will be extinct.

Don't consider the pleasures of these moments, perpetual.

Forget the tale of this fire and move forward.

 

**

 

 

10. The Memory

 

You are associated with the seasons now.

These seasons are variegated.

I'm sure that one day,

the journey of colors will end

like its bloom, the world will decline again.

Blemishes will crop up on your face.

The widow desires will stream down,

like the tears of pale seasons

when you run into the dreams of age,

you will be gloomy and think in the heart

that this world was a memory.

Then, with tearful eyes, you will explore yourself and smile,

the world was but the same.

I merely had a beloved,

I don't know if he's alive or dead,

I only remember he was a crazy man.

The poet on those roads embraced the walls.

I don't know what he was writing.

 I wish he sometimes had passed with utterances:

~ Zareena is a character of alive dreams.

Zareena is a learned philosophy.

How Zareena can be forgotten

if only I could see him in prostrations again.

The poet on those roads,

if he's dead,

may heaven be his abode now.

 

 

 

Some hard words used in these poems which might need a bit definition are:

1. ~ Shay Mureed — A male character and lover of Hani in romantic story of Balochi history. For more information about this story click: Shay Mureed

2. ~  Fatihah — Al-Fatiha, alternatively transliterated Al-Fātiḥa or Al-Fātiḥah is the first surah of the Quran. It consists of 6 or 7 āyāt which are a prayer for guidance and mercy. Al-Fatiha is recited in Muslim obligatory and voluntary prayers, known as salah.

3. ~  Hani — A female character and beloved of Shay Mureed in romantic story of Balochi history. For more information click on this link: Hani

4. ~  Mecca — Mecca, in a desert valley in western Saudi Arabia, is Islam’s holiest city, as it’s the birthplace of the Prophet Muhammad and the faith itself. Only Muslims are allowed in the city, with millions arriving for the annual Hajj (pilgrimage). Dating from the 7th century, the central Masjid al-Haram (Sacred Mosque) surrounds the Kaaba, the cloth-covered cubic structure that’s Islam’s most sacred shrine.

5. ~  Zareena — A Balochi female name. 

  

 

 Reference:

 

 Azmaan Kaaristhe E Log Ent [The Sky Is the Abode of a Character]

(Balochi poetry book which was written by Chandan Sach and published by Ilm O Adab Publisher Urdu Bazar, Karachi on March 2019.)