Joke

This is a poem I found in my grandfather’s old book called “Modern Bengali Poetry”
(published in 1945).
The beauty of this is that this was only translated and published in 1945. Seeing how things would be so slow to move back in those days of turmoil, the poem had to be written atleast ten years before the English translation was published, to give sufficient time for the poetry to gain fame and deserve translation in a compilation. What amazes me is the amount of scientific knowledge Bengali poets possessed in the mid 1930s. Some of this is more than what people know about the universe even today.



Joke

Prememndra Mitra



Remember the great Joke,

In the Phantom dance of electrons

The setting sun has woven a bright border of the clouds,

And the green earth breaks in waves at the horizon.

The rain falls on the darkened town;

The gas light is caught in puddles in the streers

And slides across the asphalt.



Ah, I loved it,

The sky, the stars, the flowering grass,

And the long lashes of her eyes,

Which cast, like tall clouds, mysterious shadows

In her eye’s fathomless deeps.



Once you saw the helpless face of a child

In the street;

In the lonely sleepless night

You wept the unconsoling tears of the defeated soul,

The tears that youth alone can know;

You knew, suddenly

The infinite deep despair of sudden death

Terrible in its meaninglessness-

Know that this is but illusion

And a mirage before you.



God’s thought is just electron mathematics

Beyond the Milky Way

Covering the infinite spaces

His sport of mathematics in the nebulae

Which the strange tree

At the roadside

Stands you with the sudden shout of flowers,

And when you desire

To spread her hair across all consciousness-

Remember this game of electrons.



You may love or weep

Ask with soundless cry

The aimless question of the soul;

God’s thought is just electron mathematics

In abstract, flawless calculations.

Take comfort, from this joke of the electrons!



Yet why should I remember this?

Though there be complicated space-time geometry in the sky

The endless scribble of calculation:

For me let there be

Beyond all calculation

The irony of the we of illusion

Wrapt in the colors of intoxication,

This transitory bubble;



Birth, death, and love,

Joy, pain and the unmeaning

Prayer of the soul.

I know that this life is devoid of meaning.

But what is the use of seeing behind the joke?