Subodh Sarkar (India)

 Tukaram
 
Marathi Brahmins had three hundreds of your poems
Stoned to water and said, “Dalit , you should remain Dalit,
If You so desire to write poems, better, you were born a Brahmin”
But we all believed that those three hundred poems
Walked out of water after a year.
 
A young Brahmin girl saw you in a dream
Up on the midnight bed she hugged her husband and said
`You know who came in my dream, Tukaram!`
She was beaten up badly and thrown out of the house.
Did she arrive in your village?
She is the first woman poet in Marathi.
 
Tukaram, I am not sure that your poems walked out
Of water .
But the girl who left her house after she was
Beaten up by her husband
she could recite all the three hundred poems by heart.
 
At 38 of your age, Tukaram, you were murdered
For writing poems
But the Brahmins could not sense a small little truth
That the manuscripts thrown into the water do not mean
The poems are drowned.

Translated by KDG