A beggar boy had looked with love at riceand examinedthe paddy scattered around in the moonlight, and at their roots,grain made lustrous by facile earth,like still butter, filled with water.Can these grains become rice?Can the mute god speak?Can iron be melted?Can a piece of wood lie face-up like a woman?Yet, the beggar boy looked with love at rice.With love, saw many visions of life,even beyond life, even under the influence of weed.There is something more to life than paddy, than a woman or moonlight.Above all is a god, tormented like travellers,above all is a god, wandering like an ascetic,above all is a god, belonging to the people.To give a little rice to the beggar boy,The god has to be as contemporary as the grass,bigger than bamboo.The beggar boy was good, and the bad boys had shaved heads,they had never let themselves be embroiled in love.They, too, are still alive; they, too, are unadulterated.There are so many wonderful fruits on earth, like the gooseberry.The good and bad beggar boys have fallen from the abdomen of the beggar father.Having made and remade itself on earth, the event now was the punishment of the Chinese, their freedom, their depression.Near every conflict remains standing,a demand to stop all wars.Let our deaths be natural,let us go and die in the ways known to us.Let us plan the wedding of Kennedy and Khrushchev,the boy-explosives in their wombs have to be aborted,the girl-explosives in their wombs should be allowed to die.Let their wedding anniversary every year be lethal.Will Kennedy-Khrushchev ever expect an offspring?Then stop the rancour, megaton, war, volcanic eruption,else the hungry will tear off and eat flesh as they need.From the threatened borders of India, a pack of snow hyenas,carry the red flag of anti-religion, and only their crippling hunger.Seeing the hollow-cheeked hunger of women reflected in the eyes of the snow hyenas,Mr Chief Minister, send a group of Hungry Poets.They can’t even write, they can drink unnaturally,and eating up the entire border, they will discuss at Coffee Housethat modern poetry and prose are perhaps not that different.In Bengal, weddings take place at 3:30 p.m.,Jyoti Basu is responsible for the leather works on Bentinck Street,how well did Soumitra act in the Chinese expedition?Why can’t people accept poetry like rice?Will they, when the war ends? Even the beggars get poetry,why won’t you, professor, Mr Chief Minister?
* The poem was published in 1962 within the weekly bulletins of the avant-garde Hungry Generation (Hungryalist) movement. The poem is a critique addressed to the establishment.