Poems of Pictures

By Anjan Sen
Images By Prabhas Kejriwal
Trans. Jesse Knutson

What do I know about light?
I don’t know about light, my dear, I don’t know about light.
In darkness’ midst a butterfly of fire
In Brahmā’s egg, in diffusion.

In the mirror there is an indistinct image
What kind of fancy is this? What illusion?
The illusory form brings
An inconceivable white ray.

A blue lotus appears in this eye
Below and above are the Ganges and Yamuna, at the lotus’s base, its pot
On the head is a lotus of a thousand blossoms
Downward it rains honey.

There is a yogi seated inside a tree
In the dark came light in darkness’ interior
Dead or alive at night or is it day?
He becomes an endless radiance of darkness

A lengthy tree trunk
Its hollow the color of sandal
On which emerges the mark of a heart
Love has become a tree

There was great cosmic darkness
Before the first light
Suddenly a ray appears:
In four streams its indistinct rainbow.

In primal darkness a blue and rose luster
Endless black streams poured over the giant cosmos
Not very far away again
The first day’s sun.

At morning, a yellow flowery light
Comes and falls on Nature’s body
From inside the earth suddenly appears manifest the form of Śiva’s phallus,
Light and dark on its four sides golden.

All colors are floating
The stars gain the luster of crystals
The colors’ prettiness blankets a blazing luster
The stars have wings and fly off.

A tree sits firm spanning some centuries
On the edge of the mind in the city of consciousness
Spilling green all over the rough cosmos
A tree becomes thought

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Poems of Pictures