Whichever beautiful thing I view

I recollect you alone

However I try to reach you

You are going afar leaving me alone.

How can I catch you?

How to tell about myself?

You are somewhere away far

You are of the category of divinity

You are the token of immense beauty

Unavailable to any of the humanity!

How can you know my pain?

I cannot tell my excruciation!

I can’t speak in the nature and tune

That can reach you even.

My heart can’t speak

But it tones like the ambiguous tunes

Of broken lute strings

Enabling you to know

I abridged my feelings in colorful pictures,

Not in oil paintings or in rain bow colors.

Is it unknown or unknowable color?

Or is it of white grey or ash texture?

Even then when I sculptured your statue

I meant it was for you

Then if you see it as a lump of mud!

I have no language or ideas

To write in poems and

My mind is a dumb jasmine bud!

How to tell you? How to reach you?

How to meet you?

The call from my heart you can’t get

I can’t even hear loud noise from that side.

On some day or any other day

I will merge into the clay

Death succeeds birth.

Hence I wish your companionship.

Suppose it doesn’t happen

From the ashes mingled in earth

Would not I become a grassy blossom?

Sometime later on any day

When you walk on that way,

Will not the dust of your feet

Scatter on my body straight?

I’ll feel I attained atonement.

***

(Translation of Telugu verses”Gaddi Poovu”of Smt. Pingali Bhattiprolu Bala Devi

Retired Reader in Biology, Bhubaneswar)

By

Rama Rao Saripalli

.