Enemy Poem by Prayag Saikia

A robust youth
Emerged
From the poetry- field
Driving buffaloes

The earth is all green with crops
The cage of the sky
Rests merging with the horizon

Birds and men
Amid the crops………………
From the watch-tower someone is scaring away
Enemy poems

A scare- crow with outstretched hands
With a loose shirt on
Stands immutably
It too is scaring away enemy poems
Who isn't an enemy………….
From insects and centipedes
To birds and men
For hunger alone one is foe to another

Man, the sentinel
Too would one day reap the fields
Immutable is that man-made doll
That stands to drive off birds
It too has its enemies after all

The drizzle of a dismal sky
Is in enmity to its body
Or else the fire in the stubbles
Though shorn of life
Remains
Thirstless
Hunger less
An immutable witness of reality

(Translated from Original Assamese by Krishna Dulal Barua)