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Bulbul Tarang

Of mint and grapevine 

Where is the corner of the soul

Where your wild flower, your raw bleeding

Can take its root in golden veins

Where every yesterday is broken

To belong the bride of the morrow alone?

Taking me back to the streets

I crossed at the dawn of my youth

Every crossroads a mine field

Every valley a graveyard

You come back as a dark dream

From which I wake in perplexion

Silenced, muted, abandoned

To a no-man's land of shared pain

No name is there for you and me

To call each other by

We're of a city bereft, and in her heart

Is a wall

All our words are meant for strangers

In those deep nights of bitterness

A hand may stray, a wing may flap,

A soul catch fire and burn out

Driven over the edge by the madness

Of crazed and impossible loves

Whose domain are dead alleys

In the underbellies of towns

Where crippled dogs and stray cats

And ragged beggars reign supreme

The beads of the abacus turn

And the world lies abandoned 

I believe in the rain

I believe in the seasons 

And in every rose that is fragrant

Called by any which name

In that valley of flowers 

Where a rose is a rose 

And nothing else and owned by none

Save the soil, save the branch,

Save the leaf and the petal 

And sun and rain

And night and day

There shall you find my answer

To the pain in your eyes,

Player of the Bulbul

Tarang

When the dead can be buried

For the new vine to grow

And submerged wells shall yield water

Again

Then your voice shall return

With the chords of song within me

When part of my soul shall be able

To claim part of yours as its own

Without being guilty of treason

A name shall be given us

Which you and I recognise 

And strangers shall not take away

To suit desires not our own

This world and its suffering -

Think of it at this moment

As a thing of the past

Even as the raw wound 

Is bleeding still

And a century's scars 

Crust our veins like tar

The seed of new roses,

Even here, even now

With all the might of life and craving

That brings all things to birth and light

Stirs deep within the restless earth 

And shapes, unseen and undenied

The world that lies waiting 

Like the dawn of the day

Fills every crevice of the night