‘Koel’ by Eunice de Souza

Koel, stop those cries.
I can’t take it this morning.
The wood-doves join your chorus of grief.

Look! The leaves are shining green
the sky a sort of blue
there’s even a breeze from the sea.

We’ll survive somehow,
Koel, stop those cries.

‘Stay with the Song’ by Mamang Dai

The afternoon belongs to the dove
weeping for her fall from heaven.
The feast of life is laid before our eyes,
but the ticking moment
discloses nothing about time;
its footsteps, and their meaning.
Evening –
The sun goes away
carrying its quiver of arrows.
Every word we utter now is a memory
until the sun returns.
Stay with the song.

All night –
Don’t lose the chord
that binds all things together.
Rain blows down from the hills
pushed by grey clouds,
and a white, ordinary moon
suddenly draws our gaze upwards.

Daybreak –
The bright cry of the peacock.
Morning light touches the grass.
It is time to leave.
Not all the things we know will heal us.
Not all the things we fear will kill us.

‘After the End’ by Ashok Vajpeyi

After the end
we won’t sit quiet.

We’ll quarrel again,
we’ll seek again,
leap over boundaries again.

Earth water fire
wind and sky
we’ll tell them again,
Come,
give us form,
give us shape.

The same as before
the same
that the end thinks
it has erased forever.

After the end
we won’t be finished.
We’ll hover here
close to life,
blossoming like scent,
flowing like air,
gathering like memory.

In the end
we’ll evade the end
and come here again.
After the end
we won’t sit quiet.

translated from the Hindi by Rahul Soni.

‘The days are cool, the nights hot…’ by Muktabai

The days are cool, the nights hot.
Up and down, it’s all His seed.
With no beginning and no end,
Are you free to go with the flow?
When all force is spent,
Heaven spreads out before you.
But in the end, it’s all one.

Muktai says: Get to the place
Where you get this.

Translated from Marathi by Jerry Pinto and Neela Bhagwat.

‘Night found your lost memories…’ by Faiz Ahmed Faiz

Night found your lost memories and swept them in
Like spring alighting on scrub by stealth
Like the stir and rustle of cool desert winds,
Like a fevered brow cooling to sudden health.

Translated from Urdu by Keki Daruwalla.

Excerpted with permission from A Time For Change: Songs of Hope and Resilience, edited by Jerry Pinto, Speaking Tiger Books.