1-Two Children (1946)

Two children, who have come to play at a riverbank, are bickering, oblivious to their beautiful surroundings. Then the poet (who is one of the children) urges her companion to stop fighting, and pay heed to the butterflies, the honey-filled flowers and green grass, the beauty of nature that has been beckoning to them all along, to join in the celebration of life. This poem was written in the backdrop of the Bengal partition and the atrocities that the poet saw in those days.

Enough of this futile one-upmanship, enough, my dear friend

Although this new age cloaks us

In fine white silk to cover

Our primeval animal selves

They rise in revolt and

Indulge in their demonic dance

Why do we stone each other with thoughts that wound

Why do we hold up mirrors to each other’s souls

To display the ugliness and inadequacies

And then feel sad, feel ashamed?

The fruit is sweet only in time, when it ripens.

Nature finds nothing unforgivable

The sky glimmers like a mother’s eyes

As she watches her children at play

Before that infinitely gentle gaze,

Who is guilty, who is humiliated?

As the game ends and we depart

Hand in hand,

Let Love come and roost again

Within our interlaced fingers.