Ruskin Bond's Book of Verse Read online

  Ruskin Bond

  Ruskin Bond’s Book of Verse

  Contents

  About the Author

  Introduction

  Love

  It Isn’t Time That’s Passing

  Love Lyrics for Binya Devi

  The Love of Two Stars

  Lovers Observed

  Walnut Tree

  Walnut Tree Revisited

  Phantom Lover

  We Must Love Someone

  Love Is a Law

  Enough for Me

  Nature

  Raindrop

  Lone Fox Dancing

  So Beautiful the Night

  The Bat

  Walk Tall

  Rain in the Hills

  Silent Birth

  Listen!

  Firefly in My Room

  Rain

  The Owl

  The Snail

  The Snake

  Once You Have Lived with Mountains

  The Trees

  Butterfly Time

  Dandelion

  Night Thoughts

  Wild Is the Wind

  The Whistling Schoolboy

  These Simple Things

  A Bedbug Gives Thanks

  Childhood

  Sweet Dolly

  Boy in a Blue Pullover

  Little One Don’t Be Afraid

  View from the Window

  Cherry Tree

  Kites

  I Was the Wind Last Night

  Tigers Forever

  Evening by the Fireside

  Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark

  Slum Children at Play

  The Pool

  Granny’s Proverbs

  What Can We Give Our Children?

  On Wings of Sleep

  Humour

  Cricket—Field Placings

  A Frog Screams

  We Are the Babus

  Do You Believe in Ghosts?

  The Demon Driver

  Foot Soldiers

  Self-Portrait

  Portents

  In Praise of the Sausage

  A Nightmare

  Granny’s Tree-Climbing

  Song for a Beetle

  The Cat Has Something to Say

  Song of the Cockroach

  Travel

  Remember the Old Road

  Garhwal Himalaya

  Parts of Old Dehra

  Hill-Station

  A Song for Lost Friends

  Secondhand Shop in Hill Station

  At the Grave of John Mildenhall in Agra

  Words to Live By

  The Wind and the Rain

  Pebbles

  One Flower

  To Live in Magic

  For Silence

  Last Words

  This Land Is Mine

  Dare to Dream

  Out of the Darkness

  Haikus and Other Verses

  Haikus

  Out of the Dark

  Lost All My Money

  If Mice Could Roar

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  RUSKIN BOND’S BOOK OF VERSE

  Ruskin Bond’s first novel, The Room on the Roof, written when he was seventeen, received the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1957. Since then he has written a number of novellas, essays, poems and children’s books, many of which have been published by Penguin. He has also written over 500 short stories and articles that have appeared in magazines and anthologies. He received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1993, the Padma Shri in 1999 and the Padma Bhushan in 2014.

  Ruskin Bond was born in Kasauli, Himachal Pradesh, and grew up in Jamnagar, Dehradun, New Delhi and Shimla. As a young man, he spent four years in the Channel Islands and London. He returned to India in 1955. He now lives in Landour, Mussoorie, with his adopted family.

  Introduction

  At the end of The Room on the Roof, the novel I wrote more than fifty years ago when I was still in my teens, Rusty and Kishen are trudging back to their ‘home’ in Dehra, and Kishen says: ‘One day you’ll be a writer or an actor or something. Maybe a poet! Why not a poet, Rusty?’ And Rusty smiled. He knew he was smiling because he was smiling at himself.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘why not a poet?’

  And that’s where the book ends.

  But not the story.

  Because Rusty (read Ruskin) did become a writer; but, having to make a living from the written word, he became a writer chiefly of prose; for as we all know, you can’t make a living writing poetry.

  But poetry remained my first love, and whenever I felt the urge I put down my thoughts, feelings and observations into verse form, sometimes slipping these poems into my prose works and anthologies when my publishers weren’t looking! I have never had any pretensions to being a serious ‘poet’, which is why I prefer to use the word ‘verse’ to describe my compositions. But I do look upon the world as a poet would, and if there is a lyrical quality to some of my prose it is probably because the poet in me is trying to break free.

  Ravi Singh of Penguin India thought it would be a good idea to publish a selection from what I had written over the years, and I thought it would be helpful for the reader if the verses were arranged by theme, with the emphasis on Love, Nature, Childhood, Humour, etc. Meru Gokhale has been very helpful with the selection and arrangement of the verses.

  Perhaps Kishen (read Krishan) was being prophetic when he said, ‘Maybe a poet, Rusty…’

  Is there still time, I wonder … when we were young, time stretched before us—an infinity of time. It is only we who were finite.

  The scruffy Kishen of the The Room on the Roof grew into a successful, handsome young man. But he was barely forty when he perished, while saving a child from drowning.

  To his memory, then, I dedicate this book of verse. Perhaps he, more than any other, brought out the poet in me.

  Ruskin Bond

  19 February 2007

  Love

  It Isn’t Time That’s Passing

  Remember the long ago when we lay together

  In a pain of tenderness and counted

  Our dreams: long summer afternoons

  When the whistling-thrush released

  A deep sweet secret on the trembling air;

  Blackbird on the wing, bird of the forest shadows,

  Black rose in the long ago summer,

  This was your song:

  It isn’t time that’s passing by,

  It is you and I.

  Love Lyrics for Binya Devi

  1

  Your face streamed April rain,

  As you climbed the steep hill,

  Calling the white cow home.

  You seemed very tiny

  On the windswept mountainside;

  A twist of hair lay

  Strung across your forehead

  And your torn blue skirt

  Clung to your tender thighs.

  You smiled through the blind white rain

  And gave me the salt kiss of your lips,

  Salt mingled with raindrop and mint,

  And left me there, where I had come to fetch you—

  So gallant in the blistering rain!

  And you ran home laughing;

  But it was worth the drenching.

  2

  Your feet, laved with dew,

  Stood firm on the quickening grass.

  There was a butterfly between us:

  Red and gold its wings

  And heavy with dew.

  It could not move because of the weight of moisture.

  And as your foot came nearer

  And I saw that you would crush it,

  I said: ‘Stay. It has only a few days

  In the sun, and
we have many.’

  ‘And if I spare it,’ you said, laughing.

  ‘What will you do for me, what will you pay?’

  ‘Why, anything you say.’

  ‘And will you kiss my foot?’

  ‘Both feet,’ I said; and did so happily.

  For they were no less than the wings of butterflies.

  3

  All night our love

  Stole sleep from dusty eyes.

  What dreams were lost, I’ll never know.

  It seemed the world’s last night had come

  And there would never be a dawn.

  Your touch soon swept the panting dark away—

  Some suns are brighter by night than day!

  4

  Your eyes, glad and wondering,

  Dwelt in mine,

  And all that stood between us

  Was a blade of grass

  Shivering slightly

  In the breath from our lips.

  But grass will bend.

  We turn and kiss,

  And the world swings round,

  The sky spins, the trees go hush

  Hush, the mountain sings—

  Though we must leave this place,

  We’ve trapped forever

  In the trembling air

  The last sweet phantom kiss.

  5

  I know you’ll come when the cherries

  Are ripe;

  But it is still November

  And I must wait

  For the green fruit to blush

  At your approach.

  And meanwhile the tree is visited

  By robber bands, masked mynas

  And yellow birds with beaks like daggers,

  Determined not to leave one cherry

  Whole for lovers.

  But still I wait, hoping one day

  You’ll come to stain your lips

  With cherry-juice, and climb my tree;

  Bright goddess in your dark green temple,

  Thrusting your tongue at me.

  6

  Slender waisted, bright as a song,

  Dark as the whistling-thrush at dawn,

  Swift as the running days of November,

  Lost like a dream too sweet to remember.

  The Love of Two Stars

  Two stars fell in love. Between them came sky

  And ten moons and two suns riding high,

  Before them the nebulous star-crusted Way,

  The silence of Night, the silver of Day.

  A million years passed, the lovers still glowed

  With the brilliance and fire and passion of old;

  But one star grew restless and set off at night

  With a wonderful shower of hot white light.

  He sped to his love, with his hopes and his fears,

  But missed her, alas, by a thousand light-years.

  Lovers Observed

  Lovers lie drowsy in the grass,

  Sunk in bracken, swimming in pools

  Of late afternoon sunshine;

  All agitation past, they stay totally

  Absorbed in grass.

  Green grass, and growing from that place

  A sweep of languid arm still bare

  But for a lost ladybird.

  Anonymous lover brushes a dragon

  Fly from his face.

  Brief thunder blossoms in the air,

  A leaf between the thighs is caught

  And crushed. Love comes like a thief,

  Crouching among the bruised and broken clover.

  All flesh in grass.

  Walnut Tree

  The walnut tree is the first to lose its leaves,

  But at the same time the fruit ripens,

  The skin splits, the hard shell of the nut

  Stands revealed. Yesterday (the last of August)

  You climbed among the last few crumpled leaves,

  Slim boy in a walnut tree, your toes

  Gripping the tender bark, your fingers

  Fondling walnuts, while I waited and counted,

  And there were twenty-three walnuts on the grass.

  We cracked them open with our teeth.

  They were still raw but we could not wait:

  The walnuts would age and I might grow younger!

  Walnut Tree Revisited

  You have ripened, since last the walnut tree

  Lost its dark leaves, last autumn.

  One summer intervened between your growing

  And my importunity;

  One summer lost,

  while walnuts grew;

  I too had forgotten.

  We saw each other often,

  But gone was the magic

  Of that first encounter;

  And even the tree

  Gave little fruit last year.

  Now it stands bare-branched

  Outside the closed window,

  Touched no more by feet and questing fingers,

  But turning its own fingers

  To the slanting winter sun.

  Not one leaf left, where hundreds

  Glittered like spears in the forest of September.

  But I will wait until the parrots bring

  Shrill portents of another spring;

  (And I will love you with the same sweet pain,

  If you and summer care to visit me again.)

  Phantom Lover

  Night unto night

  When the world’s asleep,

  You come to me,

  Our tryst to keep.

  Held captive, in thrall,

  As the stars look down,

  Body and soul

  From night unto dawn.

  Silent you come

  And softly you go,

  Ours is a love

  That none must know.

  We Must Love Someone

  We must love someone

  If we are to justify

  Our presence on this earth.

  We must keep loving all our days,

  Someone, anyone, anywhere

  Outside our selves;

  For even the sarus crane

  Will grieve over its lost companion,

  And the seal its mate.

  Somewhere in life

  There must be someone

  To take your hand

  And share the torrid day

  Without the touch of love

  There is no life, and we must fade away.

  Love Is a Law

  Who shall set a law to lovers?

  Love is a law unto itself

  Love gained is often lost

  And love that’s lost is found again

  It’s love that makes the world go round

  Love that keeps us closely bound

  Take this power to love away

  We would be just beasts of prey

  If Love should lose its hold on us

  Discord would rule the Universe.

  Enough for Me

  Enough for me that you are beautiful:

  Beauty possessed diminishes.

  Better a dream of love

  Than love’s dream broken;

  Better a look exchanged

  Than love’s word spoken.

  Enough for me that you walk past,

  A firefly flashing in the dark.

  Nature

  Raindrop

  This leaf, so complete in itself,

  Is only part of a tree.

  And this tree, so complete in itself,

  Is only part of the mountain.

  And the mountain runs down to the sea.

  And the sea, so complete in itself,

  Rests like a raindrop

  On the hand of God.

  Lone Fox Dancing

  As I walked home last night

  I saw a lone fox dancing

  In the cold moonlight.

  I stood and watched. Then

  Took the low road, knowing

  The night was his by right.

  Sometimes, when words ring true,
/>   I’m like a lone fox dancing

  In the morning dew.

  So Beautiful the Night

  I love the night, Lord.

  After the sun’s heat and the day’s work,

  It’s good to close my eyes and rest my body.

  It’s a good time for small creatures:

  Porcupines come out of their burrows

  to dig for roots.

  The night-jar calls tonk-tonk!

  The timid owl peeps out of his hole in the tree trunk

  Where he has been hiding all day.

  Insects crawl out in thousands.

  The wind comes down the chimney

  and blows around the room.

  I’m watching the stars from my window.

  The trees are stretching their arms in the dark

  and whispering to the moon.

  But if the trees could walk, Lord,

  What a wonderful sight it would be—

  Armies of pines and firs and oaks

  Marching over the moonlit mountains.

  The Bat

  Most bats fly high,

  Swooping only

  To take some insect on the wing;

  But there’s a bat I know

  Who flies so low

  He skims the floor;

  He does not enter at the window

  But flies in at the door,

  Does stunts beneath the furniture.

  Is his radar wrong,

  Or does he just prefer

  Being different from other bats?

  I’ve grown quite used to him:

  He appeals to the paradox in me.

  And when sometimes

  He settles upside down

  At the foot of my bed,

  I let him be.

  On lonely nights, even a crazy bat

  Is company.

  Walk Tall

  You stride through the long grass,

  Pressing on over fallen pine-needles,

  Up the winding road to the mountain-pass:

  Small red ant, now crossing a sea

  Of raindrops; your destiny

  To carry home that single, slender

  Cosmos seed,

  Waving it like a banner in the sun.

  Rain in the Hills

  In the hushed silence of the house

  when I am quite alone, and my friend, who was here,

  has gone, it is very lonely, very quiet,

  as I sit in a liquid silence, a silence within,

  surrounded by the rhythm of rain

  the steady drift

  of water on leaves, on lemons, on roof,

  drumming on drenched dahlias and window panes,

  while the mist holds the house in a dark caress.

  As I pause near a window, the rain stops.

  And starts again.

  And the trees, no longer green but grey,

  menace me with their loneliness.

  Silent Birth

  When the earth gave birth to this tree,

  There came no sound:

  A green shoot thrust

  In silence from the ground.

  Our births don’t come so quiet—