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Mainstream, VOL LI, No 1, December 22, 2012 [Annual 2012]

The Song of the Juniors

Thursday 3 January 2013

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Our early years had been scadling pain,
Our times hung heavy all the while,
What calamities, what disasters to pass through!
On the wide wilderness of hugetime
I see your hand beckoning under your banyon shade
With the boon of your thousand roots—
And our dead boyhood and youth come to life.
 
Not to the enchantress, it was of man’s own making,
Of men of the earth, in man’s homage to man!
In pin-pointed eyes and ever-alert work,
That ever-quick heart, Lenin’s mind and life
Gave wings to youth, high up in the skies.
 
And so we all hear that music of the stars
And see Volga imaged in Ganga!
Yes, we admit our nights and days are our own,
No magic gift, but sons of the same great mother, we bring
With folded hands, into your hands our late-born youth
 
Elder! You built up the archetype,
So, on the shoals of our Ganga,
On the peak of Meghna’s current we build up history
Over the floods of the dream, of the new life of our burnt-up wilderness,
However eaten-up and impoverished be the present,
One blue sky sings over both the lands.
Bind our youth with the rakhi of friendship.

Bishnu Dey
(Translated from the original Bengali by the poet himself)

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