The Song of the Juniors

Our early years had been scadling pain,

Our times hung heavy all the while,

What calamities, what disasters to pass through!

On the wide wilderness of hugetime

I see your hand beckoning under your banyon shade

With the boon of your thousand roots—

And our dead boyhood and youth come to life.

 

Not to the enchantress, it was of man’s own making,

Of men of the earth, in man’s homage to man!

In pin-pointed eyes and ever-alert work,

That ever-quick heart, Lenin’s mind and life

Gave wings to youth, high up in the skies.

 

And so we all hear that music of the stars

And see Volga imaged in Ganga!

Yes, we admit our nights and days are our own,

No magic gift, but sons of the same great mother, we bring

With folded hands, into your hands our late-born youth

 

Elder! You built up the archetype,

So, on the shoals of our Ganga,

On the peak of Meghna’s current we build up history

Over the floods of the dream, of the new life of our burnt-up wilderness,

However eaten-up and impoverished be the present,

One blue sky sings over both the lands.

Bind our youth with the rakhi of friendship.

Bishnu Dey
(Translated from the original Bengali by the poet himself)