Poems by Piyush Thakkar 

Entering the Womb 
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When he woke up
The sleep had slowly departed
Like a receding tide
Yet a little dampness suffused his eyes
 
The legs didn’t ache
The head didn’t feel heavy
There was no sense of shame
The mind wasn’t entangled in any manipulation
 
Time was spread out
Like feebly flowing waves
Of the ebbing sea
Or maybe
He was stretched out
As if he’d settled all accounts with Time
 
There was neither darkness nor light
Such was the brightness all around
Leaning on the indolently drifting wind
He sat up
As he stood up today
His legs didn’t feel the body’s burden
As if the ground itself were elevated despite the weight
He took a few steps
There was no rush to reach anywhere
Nor any anxiety
Like air entering a tree
He entered the door to the outdoors
 
How can one say that all was in order
Of course he knew
That something different
Was going on within him
 
Finally
The earth  entered him through sleep
And owned him again
 
It was as if
He had entered the womb again
 
 
Translated from the Gujarati by Dileep Zhaveri
 
 
Day Never Breaks 

My head swings
Now this side
And now that
Like a pendulum
 
But nothing chimes
No hand strikes time
 
I lie as if dead
Neither awake nor asleep
Neither dreaming nor liquefying
 
Neither can I step out of the house
Nor can I enter it
I am stuck
Smack in the middle
Between the letters shubh and labh written
On the threshold
Like the pot-bellied idol of Ganpati on the entrance
Discoloured grey desolate
 
(But look on the other side
A line of ants passes by)
 
My head turns
Now left
Now right
 
The day, however,
never breaks
 
 
Translated from the Gujarati by Sachin C. Ketkar
 

Piyush Thakkar is a poet, artist, and art educator. As a visual artist, his forté is drawing. His poems have been featured in anthologies of modern Gujarati poetry and translated into several Indian languages. Lakhun Chhun, his first collection of poems in Gujarati, has been awarded by the Gujarati Sahitya Parishad with the Takhtsinh Parmar Paritoshik for the best first book of creative writing published in 2014–15. Piyush works as an assistant professor at the Department of Painting, Faculty of Fine Arts, the M. S. University of Baroda, Vadodara.
 
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Dileep Jhaveri is a bilingual writer. He has published several poems, a play and a travelogue in Gujarati. His poems and prose in English were published by New Feral Press, New York. He has been translated into many languages and invited to several countries.

Sachin C. Ketkar is a bilingual poet, translator, and academic. He has written several poetry collections in English and Marathi, and some of his Marathi poems have been translated into Gujarati, Hindi, Urdu, Kannada, Malayalam and Telugu. His translations of poetry and fiction from Marathi and Gujarati into English have appeared in various journals and anthologies. He has translated and edited an anthology of contemporary Marathi poetry titled Live Update: An Anthology of Recent Marathi Poetry (2005). In 2000, he won the Indian Literature Poetry Translation Prize, awarded by the Sahitya Akademi’s Indian Literature journal, for his translation of modern Gujarati poetry.

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