Drunk I am today, O’ you little tender world. With the book of life open before me, thwarted, blank, I sit here before you all. Immersed in myself, I am in the Tundikhel, floating between medieval and modern times. A peanut seller came with a basket of peanuts and sat beside me. He gave me, a handful of peanuts in a colorful piece of paper. I tossed the peanuts into the air, and started reading the paper instead. The peanut seller smiled and waved me goodbye, saying, “You are drunk, very drunk today, my friend! “In remote western Nepal, people heard the Beatles on battery-powered tape decks before they saw electric lights, and helicopters fluttered into their lives long before the first trucks got there,” these sentences rose from their slumber and stirred my heart. “The first airplane landed in Nepal in 1949 but it was seven years later before the first highway connected Kathmandu to the outside world. Within a year of that first landing, the Rana autocracy was overthrown with the aid of an airplane.” These sentences came out from the paper, and grappled my throat. I stood up but the gravity of the revelation pulled me down. I was now drunk, dead drunk with a million pegs worth of thoughts. I sat on the grass for a while, thinking about old Nepal and my grandfather’s life then. Then I shifted my thoughts over to the New Nepal we claim to be building now. Where are the roots of the new Nepal we claim to be building? Where are the roots? With a million thoughts in my head, I headed to my home dusting the bare bodies of the erotic sculptures on the multi-tiered pagodas of hope. Yes, drunk I am today. Today I am drunk. With the book of life open before me, thwarted, blank, I sit here before you all.
Nepalese poet, Bhuwan Thapaliya works as an economist, and is the author of four poetry collections and currently he is working on his fresh poetry collection, The Marching Millions. Thapaliya’s books include, Safa Tempo: Poems New and Selected (Nirala Publication, New Delhi), Our Nepal, Our Pride , Verses from the Himalayas and Rhythm of the Heart. (Cyberwit.net)Poetry by Thapaliya has been included in The New Pleiades Anthology of Poetry, The Strand Book of International Poets 2010, and Tonight: An Anthology of World Love Poetry, as well as in literary journals such as Urhalpool, MahMag, Kritya, FOLLY, The Vallance Review, Nuvein Magazine, Foundling Review, Poetry Life and Times, Poets Against the War, Voices in Wartime, Taj Mahal Review, VOICES (Education Project), Longfellow Literary Project, Countercurrents etc. Author: Safa Tempo: Poems New & Selected & Our Nepal, Our Pride
Robin Ouzman Hislop is Editor of Poetry Life and Times at Artvilla.com ; You may visit Aquillrelle.com/Author Robin Ouzman Hislop about author & https://poetrylifeandtimes.com See Robin performing his work Performance (University of Leeds)