Conversation with Time

Gopi Krishna Prasai

Being decorated all over my body
With love deep into my heart
Which plays within my childhood with sprouted leaves
Kisses me and resounds 
Is time that loves me most

With shadows came
The strangest relations with the earth
And the dreadful questions became candid
It seems as if the stream of happiness is flowing from my eyes
And I myself become part and parcel of time in some way or other
Alas ! it does not recognize me
I am just watching over
I am just walking along. 

A flock of birds are singing in my courtyard
Living creatures are moving and flying in accordance with time
Sometimes they run fast and sometimes they run slow
Life and the world are moving with the pace of time
And the human activities have their connection with time. 

Once it came to me and asked 
Who are you?
What do you do?
Why are you sad? 
What made you to be so?

I became unable to respond
I only know
That I am in a foreign land in search of happiness
I have been changed while searching for it
In this course of endeavoring
Tears pour out from my eyes and change into songs
My happiness become even sweeter by tolerating the pain 
When ultimately my emotions crosses the atmosphere and enters the space
'Time tells me, it is only your imagination!' 

My footsteps continue to move further without a break 
And the time says It is only an exercise
Again the time says 
Look for a proper way of your life

Change your style of living
Look at the world after all
Examine the bright and dark side of life
Brought about by change 

The people awakened by the great wars of the world
Lost everything for sex and fleeting pleasure
They have selfish motive and individual egos
Whereas the world is enjoying the atomic outcome of warfare

Why those streams do not seem to be my own?
Why those streets do not seem to be mine whereupon I used to walk?
Why can't I feel refreshing even beneath the shadows of Banyan and Pipal tree?
Why these Motor Organs don't change their shelter? 

O'deviation ! O' Transformation ! O' Mankind !
I have already become a machine, a robot now
I am no more a human being but an industrial smoke
Your talk about the fetus and chromosome 
They have become aliens to me since long
They don't like to stay in one place
They don't honour their motherland
They have become hybrids 
The changing time has tied up
It's relationship with Machine
Time has its only concern with money and material 
Time has cut off its relation with nature
Time has left the truth far-far back
Time is changing every moment along with the movement of sun
I tend to weep when I talk about time
I am afraid whether or not I can move with the pace of time
It has gone far-far away
So I weep in the midst of cow-dust
And request it to take me with 'you'

But it only looked at me and said
I don't have any relation with nature
Nor do I have faith in Spiritualism or Truth

Anyway I am half truth
Or say, I am no longer a full truth
Don't expect honesty from me
I am sorry to see you lamenting with the changing world

O' Time !
We only perceive ourselves, each other 
We don't know where are we falling down from our own earth?

Where is the Milky Way? Heavenly Ganges? 
Where is constellation? 
I have to reach everywhere because I am Time
We have been talking only about earth so far
So I say you never try to find me out
Never shed tears before me because I don't like it
Because I am Time
You know it very well
I am Time.

Translated from Nepali by Ram Bahadur Pahadi

(Courtesy: Himalayan Soul, 2013)