There were two kingdoms only:
the first of them threw out both him and me.
The second we abandoned.

Under a bare sky
I for a long time soaked in the rain of my body,
he for a long time rotted in the rain of his.

Then like a poison he drank the fondness of the years.
He held my hand with a trembling hand.
“Come, let’s have a roof over our heads awhile.
Look, further on ahead, there
between truth and falsehood, a little empty space.”

Me—a book in the attic.
Maybe some covenant or hymnal.
Or a chapter from the Kama Sutra,
or a spell for intimate afflictions.
But then it seems I am none of these.
(If I were, someone would have read me.)

Apparently, at an assembly of revolutionaries
they passed a resolution,
and I am a longhand copy of it.
It has the police’s stamp on it
and was never successfully enforced.
It is preserved only for the sake of procedure.And now only some sparrows come,

And now only some sparrows come,
straw in their beaks,
and sit on my body
and worry about the next generation.
(How wonderful to worry about the next generation!)
Sparrows have wings on them,
but resolutions have no wings
(or resolutions have no second generation).

Sometimes I think to catch the scent—
what lies in my  future?
Worry makes my binding come off.
Whenever I try to smell,
just some fumes of bird shit.
O my earth, your future!
Me—your current state.

D.H. Tracy is the author of Janet’s Cottage, forthcoming from St. Augustine’s Press. He lives in Illinois. Mohan Tracy is D.H. Tracy’s mother. Punjabi is her mother tongue. She learned Gurmukhi (a script for Punjabi in which Amrita Pritam wrote) from her grandmother when growing up in Malaysia.

Their translations of Amrita Pritam’s “A Letter” and “Empty Space” first appeared in the June 2011 issue of “Poetry Magazine”.

Amrita Pritam is featured in Edition: Small Wonder