Poems by Robin S. Ngangom

Days 

There are good days
with genteel sun in the morning
and gentle rain in the afternoon,
the same songbird at daybreak
who tweaks his carol slightly at noon
and choral cicadas calling down rain at dusk.
 
On such a good morning
a child taught to fire at a scarecrows asks,
“When do I get to shoot a real man?”
And on this immaculate day
you’ll certainly hear the singing bullets
after Sunday prayers fall silent
and bells fade away in the hills.
 
 
Suffering 

I’ve read of this universal condition.
I told myself I knew a bit of it,
having had little brushes with it.
Then on perfect, out of the blue, days of evil
the indescribable voice of a young man
whimpering for his life when being bludgeoned
and then shot,
a simple father inconsolably sobbing
for his simple child and wife
burnt alive in an ambulance that razed any hope,
the horrific shame and endless ordeal of a young woman
paraded starkly naked before sadistic eyes,
the mute agony of an eighty-year-old woman
frozen on her charred face,
the blunt bullet blows to a woman
who had already lost her mind
when shot in the face,
a wife howling for her husband’s life
even as his killers mocked her over the phone.
Already a husband, a father, a lover, a mere human
I thought I could relive these pains as if to know them,
as if I could prepare myself
if any such pain should strike me randomly,
but realise I cannot categorise suffering at all
and there may be hitherto undiscovered pains,
this cold gift on our day of birth
which yet may indeed be universal.
 
 

Born in 1959 in Imphal, Manipur, Robin S. Ngangom is a bilingual poet and translator who writes in English and Manipuri. After completing his high school in Imphal he studied English literature at Shillong’s St. Edmund’s College and the North-Eastern Hill University, where he currently teaches. His first collection, Words and the Silence, was published in 1988 and since then, he has published three more volumes of poetry and a book of translations. He was invited to the UK Year of Literature and Writing in 1995, has read his poems at literary events in India and abroad, and his poems have appeared in several prestigious anthologies and magazines. He has also co-edited two significant anthologies of poetry from Northeast India.
 
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