Stand by Me: Song of a Farmer

Abstract

Stand by Me:Song of a Farmer inspired by a poem by Surjit Patar in Punjabi Rich courtiers stand with themStand with them behind brick wallsStand with them behind barbed wiresStand with them behind police batons Prophets and seers stand by me Ravidas, Kabir, and Farid stand by me Nanak Shah Fakir stands by me Namdev and Dhanna know me and stand by me, stand by me they honor me, they stand by me the plow and the furrow stand by me the mud-baked hearth and kindling wood stand by me the clod and the pebble stand by me the stalk of wheat, the grain of rice stand by me the shadows of trees and the green of leaves stand by me [End Page 100] Their words are stone their tongues are brass their laws are golden bars my needs are as radical as roots my songs are artless and unarmed my creeds are rough and windblown come stand by me stand by me my hands carry maps of sunlight my eyes complete the flight of birds come stand by me stand by me stand by me till the rains fall come stand by me stand by me come stand by me till the rains fall [End Page 101] Alok Bhalla Alok Bhalla is a scholar, translator, and poet based in Delhi, India. Among his books are Partition Dialogues: Memories of a Lost Home, The Place of Translation in a Literary Habitat, and the four-volume collection Stories About the Partition of India, which he edited. His books of translation into English include Dharamvir Bharati's Andha Yug, Intizar Husain's A Chronicle of the Peacocks, Ram Kumar's The Sea and Other Stories, and Nirmal Verma's Dark Dispatches. He was a Lady Davis Visiting Professor at Hebrew University, Jerusalem; fellow at the Rockefeller Centre in Bellagio, Italy; and fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. Copyright © 2022 University of Hawai'i Press