Let me sit beside you for a moment.
Let my tasks lie incomplete.
My heart knows no peace without a glimpse of you.
If I toil alone, I’ll be
at an endless sea.
Spring whispers joyfully into my window.
Idle bees buzz and float upon the garden ground.
Drowning in your eyes on a day like this,
I’ll sing of my devotion
in a restful sound.
(This is my translation of a Bengali song, ‘তুমি একটু কেবল বসতে দিয়ো কাছে’, by Rabindranath Tagore.)
Let your music fall against my face
like the Shravan rain.
On my chest, in my eyes.
With the morning light,
and through the darkness of the night,
let it fall on my everyday pain and happiness.
Let it fall, let it fall like the Shravan rain.
How you revive a fruitless, flowerless branch
with the monsoon breeze; revive me
so with your music. Let it seep through
my wretched-wrought,
lifeless self. On life’s unending thirst, hunger,
unceasingly;
let it fall, let it fall like the Shravan rain.
(This is my translation of a Bengali song, ‘শ্রাবণের ধারার মতো পড়ুক ঝরে’, by Rabindranath Tagore)
