Poems by Mamang Dai
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Hello, Mountain
Every morning when the forest wakes The canopy goes for a walk Hailing the sun, courting the wind Discussing fruit and weather The idle moss turns into velvet, Branches make signs, Who says there is no time? The only thing we are given is Time Chattering life, high above Babel of tree dwellers, For a seed falling so far down to rise again, Time is a given, a foothold for the hunger of a weed, Colour, scent, camouflage And the grass that never sleeps Shooting up to meet the gaze of the mountain How are you, mountain? Is everything all right Is the earth growing old, Birds flying away, trees falling Green Mountain wearing a rain hat Are there caves and bats in your bosom, Wedged in your folds a hum of voices celebrating the anniversaries of birth and time— Is a raindrop growing into a river A rock into a jewel? In Seeking The wind is pressing my ears flat. Do the fires still burn in those small houses, that steep path, stepping on boulders, hugging trees, up—we were always climbing up. In seeking our faces were golden. My homeland, how have I described you one after another, sharing everything in a landscape winged with stories, the same as clouds moving across the sky carrying seeds of rain. It was our arms striped with light, ablaze with heat and thought. In the sun our faces were golden Stringer of beads braiding the moments, the truth about life is desire. It is the mad soul that rises rising with the wind— When the roads are washed away the sea comes crashing in beating against a coastline, A towering memory saying: Here I am! Do you remember me? Skyline, daybreak, midnight. Everything is gathered in one place, the lost pages of details, the gaps and breaks in days in a lighthouse by the river, tilting with songs about the burning stars, a twisting string floating in the well of time— Is that the curving eye of the universe? It is a curving ear, listening. In seeking our faces are golden. |
Mamang Dai is a poet and novelist born in Pasighat, Arunachal Pradesh. A former journalist and a Padma Shri awardee, Dai is the author of The White Shirts of Summer: New and Selected Poems, The Legends of Pensam (a short story collection), and the novels Stupid Cupid, The Black Hill (winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award) and Escaping the Land (longlisted for the JCB Prize). Dai lives in Itanagar, Arunachal Pradesh.
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