Bulbul Singh
And that is why I say
My body is mud.
Because it needs the rain.
It needs the sun on its face
And the mist in the hills:
Without these the mud dies
And shrinks up the earth;
Without these the soul dies.
For if the mud is gone
What else remains?
###
Long ago I heard a song
That said mud fell from heaven,
And disbelieved.
Once I heard a song that said
The sky came from the earth,
And disbelieved.
Time changes all.
Time has changed me.
Or have I come to know
That the mud
Comes from heaven
And heaven
From earth?
###
You see, when the circle ends
It returns to the same point.
Eventually, we must return
To the sea, the mud, the sky.
I made mud gods in spring
And then put gold and vermilion
In their hair and sandal
On their foreheads, and later
When the harvest came
To the mud gods I offered
The first grain and prayed
That the rains would be plentiful.
So the mud gods kept my thoughts
And watched the skies for rain:
And I return to the gods
Who kept my soul together
The mud gods of spring,
The mud gods of winter,
The mud gods of the hills
The trees, me, and mine.
For this is where the circle begins
And comes to rest, eventually.
Editor's
note: Bulbul Singh passed through San Francisco three
decades ago on his way from India to points east. He
left behind a cycle of poems he had writeen "as
my song of joy for my mother, the Mud." He had
begun them in 1973, during a drought. Here are three
of them, at a time of great floods. We do not know
where to find Bulbul Singh now. Please let us know
if you do.
=============================
We walk alone on the beach.
Two ships sail by.
The gulls are thick as snow on the rocks;
And the light is sorrowful in the sky.
The purpose of life is hidden and grey
as the clouds
That sniff the high rocks like white hounds.
Life is fragmentary and brief as the clouds
And the toppling sand mounds.
Surely we are like these things that
touch us:
The half tones, this cool pleasant wind,
The shells drying on the sands, the straggling seaweed.
We are like these things, impermanent and unpinned.
—Madeline
Gleason
from The Metaphysical Needle, 1949
Published with permission of the Estate of Madeline
Gleason.
Reprinted in the Addison Street Anthology: Berkeley's
Poetry Walk
Edited by Robert Hass and Jessica Fisher. Heyday
Press, 2004.
This is one of 126 poems on panels set in the sidewalks
of Addison Street
=============================
Marsh grasses sway
lean to east and west
and whisper.
The wind
laves their fingers.
The midges sing,
dancing through the air,
shiny, frisky.
Between the cities
where people throng on the pavements and see what the
neighbours are wearing today and housewives wash up
in hot water and replace the dishes in their cupboards
after each meal,
and where we can buy toothpaste and collars and
gramophone records in interesting shops,
are the wildernesses
where marsh grasses sway,
lean from east to west
and whisper,
curtsy blithely to the wind,
bleach themselves in the sun.
The midges hum.
—Fifty years and the houses
have new occupants,
the trams have new signs and new
leather on the seats.
—A hundred years and the cars are stopped in
long
rows, side by side they stand in eternal
caravans, pile up in great heaps,
lie with their wheels in the air like dead insects.
—A thousand years and the iron girder is a red
stripe in the sand.
Marsh grasses sway
lean to east and west
and whisper.
The wind laves their fingers.
The midges sing,
dancing around in the air,
shiny, frisky.
Rolf Jacobsen,1935,
translated from the Norweigian by Judith Jesch
Used with permission of the translator
