A  Mongolian Poem

The Future

By Gunaajav AYURZANA

Explicated by Dr Ramesh Chandra Mukhopadhyaya

Having slept deeply my head on the ground

Woken up in the realm of the sky

Delightfully raised myself up

Are the visible signs of my surroundingsreally poor like this?

Oh my dear childhood

That one morning you thought

Your future was me-

Am I really?

That time which never was

will never be found by us

My feeble childhood

There is no future for you

Having deeply resting my head on the sky

See me wake up on  the ground

At that time we two

Wont recognize each other

The poem opens with a surprise.The speaker lies on the ground and  is plunged into deep sleep. In the sleep itself he wakes up  in the realm of the sky. The imagery is singularly unique. It could be interpreted on many levels.May be poets are shamans or there are shamans of poets. The existence has three tiers in the realm of the sky, the earth , and the lower world. The shamans easily climb the tree of life and visit the blue sky which sustains the earth and the world , May be a child is a shaman though a child does not know that. May be in dreams we are in contact with the blue sky and  derive therefrom our zest for life.Or else a child can easily fly to the skies on its wings of imagination. Or else the sky could be the symbol of the realm of childhood where imagination is never inhibited.In a dream the poet goes back to the realm of sky or childhood.And surely the poet awakes there delighted, But waking up in dream and waking up on the physical plane that is on the land are so different from one another. Waking up on earth or the mundane plane or waking up from dream the poet wonders whether the visible signs  of his surroundings are really poor like what they look. In other words the grown up poet does not espy the glory of heaven lying about that the child is wont to perceive. This is significant.The poet cannot believe in the world of appearance. He doubts the reality of the world of appearance.But be that as it may the poet asks his childhood or the realm of blue sky which could stand for innocent and godly childhood  whether the child hood’s dreams of becoming an adult  have come true in the self of the poet? This is a thousand dollar question. Men always dream of the future or the shape of things to come. But do our dreams of the future ever come true? Employing the magic of poetry the poet and the child hood of the poet are face to face.The child’s fancy of the future  posits a time and a place. In other words the dreams of future posits a time and  a place. But those times and places never become real.Hence the poet addresses his childhood that it has no future.Having slept deeply on the sky the poet wakes up on the ground. While childhood implies sleeping deeply on the ground  and waking up on the sky adulthood implies sleeping deeply on the sky and waking up on the ground.. So the child cannot recognize the adult as the manifestation of its self. The adult also cannot recognize the child as its earlier self.This is an iconoclastic revelation . Commonly it is said that the child is the father of man. That is there is a continuity between childhood and manhood. But that is a myth.Child hood and manhood and thereby every stage of life every moment of life is a discrete self and the fancy of any self whatever as permanent is all moonshine.The poem thus explodes the myth of permanent self and exhorts that there should be no dreams or speculation of the future.One had better act act in the living present without brooding over the past and foreboding of the future.This is a world that we half create and half perceive. If we could peel  what we add to the world or if we could peel the skin of the world of appearance we could encounter the reality or the thing in itself. But on another level there is another myth. One sleeps in heaven and is born on earth. One sleeps in the ground and is born in heaven.That is a paradox. All great poetry revolves round a paradox. While reason is the chief cargo of prose the quinqureme of poetry carries a cargo that baffles all reason .The  great Chengis Khan however worshipped both the land and the blue sky on the first day of the White Month.The myth making power of the poet is time and again.