Day and Night and other poems

This was a day that came and went.

I don’t know how the day was spent.

The sun rose up and reached its height.

The sun went down and it was night.

Somehow the hours that passed between

Dispersed as if they’d never been

Though I attended every one

Till both the day and I were done.

Sleepless, exhausted and perplexed,

Not knowing what is coming next,

I sense the stab of causeless fears,

The tedium of pointless tears.

Lonely, yet lacking will to find

One who could ease my limbs and mind,

I wait once more for faceless day

To blind the peaceless night away.

The shapes of things that are not here

Appear, disperse, and reappear:

A room, a face, a photograph,

A book, a letter or a laugh,

A turn of phrase or hand or mind,

Ungiven gifts you’ve left behind,

Each day recall themselves to me,

Altered into reality.

Things that are here and were before,

These too are altered at the core:

This pen, this bunch of keys, this chair,

The towel you used to dry your hair,

The song you sang whose words I knew

A year before I’d heard of you,

Even these hands, that felt your touch,

Though much the same, have altered much.

O gracious moon, I recall how last year

The forms lie on the table, the paperclip removed.

The animal-cycle table is unfolded.

"What’s your name?" I ask the staring boy.

The boy carefully spits on the floor, and smiles.

His grandfather puffs at his Double Happiness cigarette

And thinks of cement and lintels; he and his son

Are building a house, and forms are outside his ken

But he is polite and describes his expenditures.

The accountant’s door faces panels of green

As yet untransplanted rice. Three women pass,

Bearing the harvested rape. The old man sighs

And says, "My second brother was a pig."

"That makes him 45 years old"; I fill the space

With a Bic pen. The boy looks at it

With wonderment at its transparency.

A picture of Lady White Snake looks down from the wall.

The abacus clicks, a chicken strays into the room.

The old man says that the Japanese burnt and killed.

The accountant mentions the Guomindang conscriptions.

The boy has heard this before and strokes his chin.

A weasel runs along the embankment of the fields

And into the standing stalks. The golden goslings

Struggle into the pond. The oxen bolt

Towards the wheat despite the woman’s curses.

And there beyond the trees the Great River flows

And flows onwards and onwards and its rippled gold

Pours itself onwards past the mulberry hills

And the investigators and investigated and the black tiles

       of roofs.

I came to this hill and watched you, full of pain,

And you hung there over that wood, just as

You do now and fill everything with light.

But nebulous and tremulous through the tears

That filled my eyes, your face appeared to me,

So troubled was my life; and is; nor has

It changed its style, beloved moon. And yet

It gives me pleasure to remember and

To count the stages of my sorrow. How

Pleasant it is, when one is young, and the path

Of hope is long and that of memory short,

To call to mind once more things from the past,

However sad, and though the pain endures.

                                    Giacomo Leopardi

(Excerpted from Summer Requiem by Vikram Seth with permission from Aleph Book Company)