Prabhanjan K. Mishra (India) lives and writes from Mumbai. He has got six books of poems published, four of his own poems and two of translations from Odia poetry into English. His poems have been included in around twenty anthologies along with other poets. He is a poet, writer of short stories, translator, editor, and critic. A former president of the poet’s association ‘Poetry Circle, Bombay’ and the editor its literary journal ‘POIESIS’

 

 

 

English

 

HARAPPAN DREAMS

 

 

Dust congeals the air

from excavation.

Dry Ghaggar* cringes with pain.

She recalls the bygone days,

houses with gambolling children,

the happy vibes of plenty -

 

Gone are green fields

sprawling by her wet thighs,

forests abounding with game,

hordes of plunderers from the north

on trails of the smell of wealth,

returning happy with the booty.

 

She looks at excavations -

lovely ancient artifacts lie scattered,

broken but beautiful;

the remains of designer-roads,

torn tombs of her departed children,

the damaged figurines of failed gods.

  

She recalls the flavours of recipes

cooked in happy Harappan homes,

their crockery and cutlery

washed in her stream.

Have those diners migrated

in search of new pastures?

 

She preens in bygone glory,

her perennial green cauldron;

seething, maddening aroma

of ripe crops; icy fountains,

keeping her thighs ever wet,

ever fertile with silt from the hinterland.

 

Ghaggar laments -

her mother Sindhu

gobbling her up alive,

with crocodile tears in eyes

for her daughter’s death, the exodus

of her hungry grandchildren.

 

 

In excruciating grief,

Ghaggar hides under earth’s alluvial,

crying impotent tears

recalling her children’s migration.

Her traces in puddles, rumoured

to be the sacred ‘Sarasvati’; it’s no consolation.

 

 

 

(Ghaggar* is a diminutive monsoon-fed stream visible during in monsoons between India and Pakistan. It dries into a bed of ditches and puddles during rest of the year. It is believed to be the remains of the extinct mythical river Sarasvati that was gobbled up by her mother river Sindhu around eight-thousand years ago during an earthquake, leaving only a small stream, the present Ghaggar. Sites of the extinct Harappan civilization are found on Ghaggar’s banks and basin, but historians believe that prosperous Harappans migrated in search of greener pastures after the earthquake.)