What the Birds Said

(Parrot Fortune Teller by Abul Azad)

I have been expecting a day

When human beings would start

Speaking to flowers, clouds

Rains, trees and death,

Presently I realize that

Nature has been talking to us

All these while but all of us

Keep our ears closed with

Various tools of distraction.

It was her one drop of tear

That woke up my soul

From its lethargic slumber

It was a mere touch of her toe

That shook me out of all illusion

To a world of astonishment

It was her yogic trance that

She had gone into while talking to me

That taught me the lessons of silence.

During the days when all mirrors

Reflect our own images in thousand forms

Of illusion and passion

Like the touch of a stone that shatters

All illusions into a million smithereens

We all would wake up and see

The billion shapes of our existence

Getting reflected in a dew drop

Or in the cry of a simple bird

And flow into the river of time.

The girl who speaks to a bird

With multi-colored feathers

The old man who could make

A bird to pick out

The present, past and future

Of those sorrowful and helpless people

From rotting pictures of muted gods

Tell us the same truth.

Whether we believe it or not

Poems and the purity of soul

Are sung by birds only

A truth that had been, that is and that would be.

I was aiming at a bird in a distance

With the arrow of my arrogance and desire

Before I could launch it

She flew unto me and said:

Take me, I am yours.

She touched my rough fingers

With her soothing feathers.

It was only then I realized

That it was not in conquest but in surrender

The future of me, the people and of the country

Resided.

It is not before an army that you surrender

Not before the war cries of soldiers

Not before the blindness of ego

Not in front of the fake gods-

Say the forests, hills, rains, rivers

And their concentrated silence to me.

Our strength to surrender resides

In the knowledge and awareness

That we ourselves had exiled from

Our perturbed memories.

Let us walk back in search of those powers

When we realize that progress

Lies in any direction in a round earth

Let us retreat from the streets.

Through the trajectories of birds

Let us fly towards a universe of

The known and the unknown

And the one that is waiting to be known.