Voice Knows No Age

C. Narayana Reddy

The voice has no old age

Except life

When years pass in life

The face carves wrinkles.

The legs hang and balance

Go on walking.

This is not applicable

To the voice of power.

It stands erect forever

And proceeds unruffled.

Whenever the mind calls upon

It does not stand with folded hands.

Its freedom is its life.

Whenever it wants to emerge

It flies and perches on the tongue.

It is the voice

That has no temperament of rising,

But not the age to set.

The bed-ridden man

In his decrepit old age

Cannot rise unless one lifts him

Whereas the voice is not like that

For it has no interdependence.

As long as the tongue utters

As long as the pen proceeds

The voice-state is in ever-rise.

The looks of over ripened age

Often turn the pages of the past.

The voice glimpses only the present,

The present-borne

Future,

If time does not favor,

The speaking tongue turns dumb

The writing hand cripples down

The voice can prove

Its existence

At least by the shivering fingers.

Title poem “Vaakkuku Vayasu Leidu” from Vaakkuku Vayasu Leidu.

(*Telugu poems translated by Dr. K Rajamouly)

Published

POETCRIT

July-Dec-2022 Vol.21 No.11

I Do Not Let Time Sleep

Poems in Translation By Dr. Katta Rajamouly

From Telugu

N. Gopi

On the leaf of time

I am writing in ink

That transcends time

The ink’s name is tears.

The cloud, formed in evaporation,

Is the cloud

Despite science telling truths

Because of the raindrop

It transformed into poetry

To a wounded bird

The sky looks doubly infinite.

Does the bird keep quiet?

To see its limits

It flies on its wings.

The sky is not somewhere

It is in the hands of space

In waning relations

In senseless of conversations

For shattering the shackles

That the sky put to the earth

Man stands.

By not letting time to sleep

It is all life...

What is about the sea!

The sea never dies--

One minute becomes standstill

Next, it looks forward to touching the moon

By its rising tides

The moon is worn away

Despite knocking the moon many times;

The moonlight still spreads its perfume

The stars do not break

Despite rubbing them infinite times;

They bloom like flowers.

Man’s spreading perfume is life

When he writes on time leaf

In the ink transcending time

The name of the picture formed

Is man

(From Kalanni Nidra Ponivvanu, pp.94-95)

Published

POETCRIT

July-Dec-2022 Vol.21 No.11

Look at It at Its Depth

 Surface never shows the beauty

Of its pearls at its bottom spread

To embed all treasures sea-bred

In safety at its profundity.

The grace of face not the case

For the assessment one’s wisdom

To know the area of a king’s kingdom

One is not to see the king’s face.

Rock is rugged and rough,

It doesn’t let us know the sculpture

At its depth in the artistic stature,

Sculpted with chisels in stuff.

Don’t look at clay as mud

See the goblet unseen when hidden,

Made in care on the wheel well-laden

Like the ornament with pearls stud,

The log of wood is shabby in looks

See the wooden statue at its deep

To shine annual layers in safe keep

Albeit its carpenter can’t read books.

Unlettered may be the shepherd boy

He turns a judge for a wise verdict

That is far beyond for one to predict

To pronounce it as a boy, sans coy.

What is in it? How would one be?

Big questions on the part of all

To answer them at the clarion call

Before leap, its depth one is to foresee!

Published

POETCRIT

July-Dec-2022 Vol.21 No.11