Love Poem – 1

Remika Thapa

Whoever you are to your people
And whatever else you might be
To other people,
Out of the crowd of all those identities of yours
I’ve stolen your image—pure, unalloyed
Awoken it with the touch of my heartbeat
And filled your breath with that of the rhododendron
That bears spring’s crimson

Oh! A pure discovery
That my psyche can hold apart;
A crystalline discovery
To know which
No logical explanation is required.

I look at you
And see myself
As though
I have found out myself from somewhere
Like I just now discovered myself
In your eyes
I do not find myself any different from you
As if you are the fluidity of my own transparent sensibility
With one and the same energy we move
And in one single meaning we exist

Above all the accounts of illusions and confusions
I am living a lively existence
Away from the map of arithmetical plus-minus
I’ve become one with the vibrancy too subtle and fine

Oh! Do you feel the trance of my breathing?

Translated from Nepali by Manprasad Subba

[Remika Thapa, a noted poet, critic and translator from Darjeeling, India, has four volumes of poems and two books of critical essays to her credit. Besides, she has two books of translation in Nepali: one, Tagore’s Geetanjali translated from Bengali and the other, a Maithili novel, Sarokar, by Pradeep Bihari, a distinguished Maithili writer. Her doctoral thesis is on “The Female Characters in Haiman Das Kirat’s Short-stories.” She is the Head of the Department of Nepali in Parimal Mitra Smriti College under North Bengal University.]