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Poetry

Nothing unfinished is completed

By Vinod Kumar Shukla
Translated from Hindi by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
India’s Vinod Kumar Shukla meditates on time, the future, and the past in two poems.
A pair of vintage storage trunks sitting on a sandy-colored, tiled floor
Photo by Sam Jotham Sutharson on Unsplash

I’m about to arrive

I’m about to arrive.

The future is so close
that it’s the next moment,
the present so past
that it’s exactly now.

Keeping the future
that’s so close and the past
that’s so near,
I’m present in the night.

In my old trunk
that borers have tunneled into,
is the junk of the past.
Recollected, it’s dazzlingly new.

I’ve almost arrived.
The time should be around eight.
I want to make a place
where I can stay in the dark hours
but time has turned
this journey into night
and the direction has made it
the night of the new moon.

Until I arrive, it’ll seem
that I’ve almost arrived,
as if I were arriving at the end of arriving.

 

Nothing unfinished is completed

Nothing unfinished is completed
but a new beginning is made
and a new unfinished left behind.
They are now so many you cannot
finish counting them. 

But look upon this unfinished life
filled with the incomplete
as a completed whole,
not one that you cannot
live abundantly. 

In this abundant life,
in the moment before death,
a new poem could begin,
like the one begun years ago,
like the first poem you wrote.

No new unfinished should be seen as the last.

From Vinod Kumar Shukla’s Treasurer of Piggy Banks, forthcoming from Circumference Books (USA) and Literary Activism/Westland (India).

English

I’m about to arrive

I’m about to arrive.

The future is so close
that it’s the next moment,
the present so past
that it’s exactly now.

Keeping the future
that’s so close and the past
that’s so near,
I’m present in the night.

In my old trunk
that borers have tunneled into,
is the junk of the past.
Recollected, it’s dazzlingly new.

I’ve almost arrived.
The time should be around eight.
I want to make a place
where I can stay in the dark hours
but time has turned
this journey into night
and the direction has made it
the night of the new moon.

Until I arrive, it’ll seem
that I’ve almost arrived,
as if I were arriving at the end of arriving.

 

Nothing unfinished is completed

Nothing unfinished is completed
but a new beginning is made
and a new unfinished left behind.
They are now so many you cannot
finish counting them. 

But look upon this unfinished life
filled with the incomplete
as a completed whole,
not one that you cannot
live abundantly. 

In this abundant life,
in the moment before death,
a new poem could begin,
like the one begun years ago,
like the first poem you wrote.

No new unfinished should be seen as the last.

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