A Walk Through the Leaf-Less, Naked Tree of Modern Nepali Poetry
The Title and the First Gesture: “Patrahin Nagna Gachh”
We begin at the threshold of the work itself, with its title serving as both a location and a first argument. The title *Patrahin Nagna Gachh* — “Leaf-Less Naked Tree” — immediately places the reader in a specific symbolic terrain, one that the poet Nagarjuna will develop across the entire collection. The title is not merely descriptive but performative: it announces a condition of radical exposure and loss, and it invites the reader to contemplate what remains when everything decorative or protective has fallen away.
The opening poem, which gives the collection its name, establishes this terrain with unmistakable clarity. Nagarjuna writes about a tree that has lost its leaves, standing bare against the sky. But this is not a lament for autumn’s beauty; it is a stark confrontation with existence itself. The tree is described not as waiting for spring but as existing fully in its nakedness. The poet insists that this condition — being patrahin (without leaves) and nagna (naked) — is not a temporary state but the fundamental truth of being. The leaves were never essential; they were concealment. What remains is the structure, the skeleton, the truth of form without ornament.
“म पत्रहीन नग्न गाछ / जसको हाँगामा कोपिला पनि छैनन्” (“I am a leaf-less naked tree / on whose branches there are not even buds”)
This is crucial: the poet identifies himself with the tree in this state. The “I” of the poem is not a speaker who observes the tree from outside but the tree itself. From the very first gesture, Nagarjuna collapses the distance between subject and object, between the human and the natural world. The tree’s nakedness is the poet’s nakedness: a condition of being stripped of illusion, of youth, of possibility (not even buds remain), and yet still standing, still existing, still being a tree in the most essential sense. The poem’s power lies in its refusal to offer consolation. There is no promise of future leaves. There is only the stark fact of presence — the tree is, and it is naked, and that is all.
The Second Movement: “Mero Priyo Sathi” (My Dear Friend) — The Address to the Other
Moving to the second poem, “Mero Priyo Sathi,” we find a shift in mode but not in fundamental concern. Where the first poem established the solitary, stripped self, this poem introduces a second figure — a sathi (friend) to whom the speaker addresses himself. The location is now relational: the speaker turns outward, but what he offers is not comfort or companionship in any conventional sense. Instead, he offers the same condition of nakedness, now framed as a kind of brutal gift.
The speaker tells his friend that he has nothing to give — no comfort, no advice, no beautiful words. What he has is only this: the truth of his own exposure. He invites the friend to stand beside him, also stripped, also without leaves. The poem’s argument is that true friendship consists not in protecting each other from the world but in standing together in full vulnerability. The friend is not being offered shelter; he is being offered companionship in exposure. The naked tree becomes not a solitary figure but a shared condition. The poet insists that this is the only authentic basis for relationship — not mutual illusion but mutual truth.
“मसँग तिमीलाई दिन केही छैन / म त केवल यो नग्नता साट्न सक्छु” (“I have nothing to give you / I can only share this nakedness”)
This poem clarifies a key term that will resonate throughout the collection: nagnata (nakedness). For Nagarjuna, nakedness is not primarily physical but existential. It is the state of being without cover, without pretense, without the social and emotional leaves that people use to hide their true forms. The poem suggests that most human interaction is a transaction of leaves — we offer each other beautiful foliage, decorative words, comforting illusions. The speaker rejects all of this. He offers only the bare structure of his being, and he asks the same from his friend. The stakes are high: this is a radical redefinition of love, friendship, and human connection.
The Third Poem: “Thaha Chaina” (Do Not Know) — Epistemological Crisis
The third poem, “Thaha Chaina,” introduces a different kind of stripping — the stripping away of certainty itself. Here the location is epistemological: the speaker confronts the limits of his own knowledge. The poem opens with a series of declarations of ignorance: “I do not know where the road goes,” “I do not know why the river flows this way,” “I do not know what the bird is saying.” What might in another poet be a kind of romantic wonder is, in Nagarjuna’s hands, a more severe investigation. The speaker is not enchanted by mystery; he is undone by it.
The poem builds through a catalog of things the speaker does not know, each one more fundamental than the last. He does not know the purpose of his own existence. He does not know whether his memories are true or fabricated. He does not know whether the people he loves are real or projections of his own need. The not-knowing is not presented as a lack to be overcome but as a condition to be inhabited. The poem’s central argument is that certainty is another form of leaves — a covering that obscures the naked truth of our fundamental ignorance. To be nagna is also to be epistemologically bare: without the assurance of knowledge, without the comfort of understanding.
“थाहा छैन मलाई / म किन यहाँ छु / तर यो पनि थाहा छैन / कि म छु वा छैन” (“I do not know / why I am here / but I also do not know / whether I am or am not”)
This poem pushes the logic of the collection into its most radical territory. If the naked tree does not know why it stands, does not know whether it will fall, does not even know if it truly exists — then what does it mean to be a tree at all? Nagarjuna does not answer this question. He insists on the question itself, on the condition of radical uncertainty that the stripped self must inhabit. The poem’s power comes from its refusal to resolve. It ends not with a conclusion but with a deeper unknowing: the speaker questions even his own existence. This is not nihilism but a kind of existential rigor — a determination to remove every leaf of false certainty.
The Fourth Poem: “Surya Ra Chandrama” (Sun and Moon) — Cosmic Scale of Exposure
In “Surya Ra Chandrama,” Nagarjuna expands the frame from the personal to the cosmic. The location is now the entire universe: the speaker contemplates the sun and moon as fellow travelers in nakedness. Where traditional poetry might see the sun as glorious and the moon as romantic, Nagarjuna sees them as objects of exposure. The sun is a burning, naked eye that sees everything without concealment. The moon is a pale, naked face that reflects only what is given, with no added warmth or color.
The poem makes a startling move: it argues that the sun and moon are also patrahin nagna — leaf-less and naked. They do not adorn themselves. They do not hide. They simply are what they are, in constant exposure, constantly seen. The speaker aligns himself with them. He says, “I am like the sun: I cannot close my eyes to the world.” He says, “I am like the moon: I only reflect what is true, even if it is cold.” This cosmic identification serves to universalize the condition of nakedness. It is not a personal failing or a tragic fate; it is the fundamental condition of all existence, from the smallest leaf-less tree to the largest star.
“सूर्य पनि नग्न छ / चन्द्रमा पनि नग्न छ / र म पनि नग्न छु / यो ब्रह्माण्डको नियम हो” (“The sun is also naked / the moon is also naked / and I am also naked / this is the law of the universe”)
This poem clarifies the cosmic dimension of Nagarjuna’s project. The nakedness is not merely personal or psychological; it is ontological. It is the way things are. The law of the universe, as the poet states, is exposure. There is no shelter, no covering, no escape from being seen as one truly is. But this is not, in Nagarjuna’s hands, a cause for despair. Rather, it is a cause for a kind of terrible clarity. If everything is naked, then nothing is hidden. If nothing is hidden, then there is nothing to fear from exposure. The sun does not fear being seen; it is light itself. The moon does not fear being seen; it is reflection itself. The poet, in aligning himself with them, claims the same freedom: to be fully seen, fully known, fully exposed, and to continue existing without shame.
The Fifth Poem: “Khoi” (Lost/Forgotten) — The Unraveling of Narrative
The fifth poem, “Khoi,” shifts the ground once more. The location now is the experience of loss and forgetting — but not the loss of a specific person or object. The speaker has lost something more fundamental: the story of his own life. “Khoi” is a word that means “lost” but also “I don’t know” or “who knows” — it carries the sense of something that has slipped away and cannot be recovered. The poem begins with the speaker trying to remember something important, but he cannot. He searches through his memory and finds only fragments, disconnected images, names without faces, faces without names.
The poem unfolds as a kind of inventory of what has been lost: a childhood home, a lover’s voice, a moment of happiness, a particular kind of light at a particular time of day. But each memory dissolves as soon as it is grasped. The speaker realizes that he is not losing memories; he is losing the narrative coherence that held them together. His life is becoming a collection of isolated moments without sequence or meaning. The story — the leaves that connected the branches of his experience — has fallen away, leaving only the bare moments themselves.
“के खोएको हो मलाई थाहा छैन / तर केही खोएको छ / जुन फेरि पाइने छैन” (“I do not know what has been lost / but something has been lost / that will never be found again”)
This poem deepens the collection’s meditation on time and memory. If the earlier poems established that the self is naked in the present, this poem shows that the past also becomes naked — stripped of the narrative covering that made it meaningful. The speaker cannot piece together his own story. He is left with the brute fact of his existence in the present, without the comfort of a coherent past. But again, Nagarjuna does not offer nostalgia or regret as a response. The poem’s tone is not mournful; it is investigative. The speaker is trying to understand what it means to exist without a story. The answer, suggested but never stated, is that this is another form of nakedness — the nakedness of time itself, without the leaves of narrative that make time bearable.
The Sixth Poem: “Yo Jindagi” (This Life) — The Argument Against Hope
In “Yo Jindagi,” Nagarjuna directly addresses the question of hope, which has been hovering in the background of the earlier poems. The location is now the refusal of consolation. The speaker looks at his life — “yo jindagi” — and describes it without metaphor, without elevation. It is a series of days, mostly ordinary, punctuated by small pains and smaller pleasures. There is no grand arc, no hidden purpose, no promised fulfillment. The poem’s argument is that hope is itself a form of leaves — a covering that prevents us from seeing life as it actually is.
The speaker says: “This life does not promise anything. It does not get better. It does not become meaningful. It simply continues.” This is stated not with bitterness but with clarity. The poet has stripped away the illusion that the future will redeem the past, that suffering has a purpose, that the naked tree will eventually grow new leaves. The poem insists that the tree will not grow new leaves. The buds are gone. And yet the tree continues to stand. This is the core of Nagarjuna’s vision: existence without redemption, life without the promise of meaning, and the possibility of continuing even so.
“यो जिन्दगी केही हुँदैन / केही हुने आशा पनि नगर / तर यो जिन्दगी छ / र तिमी पनि छौ” (“This life does not become anything / do not even hope that it will become anything / but this life is / and you are also here”)
This poem is perhaps the most difficult in the collection, and the most important for understanding Nagarjuna’s project. It rejects not only traditional religious consolation (that life has a higher purpose) but also modern secular consolation (that life can be made meaningful through effort or love or creativity). The speaker says that none of this works — or rather, that all of these are forms of covering, ways of avoiding the naked truth. The truth is that life does not become anything. It simply is. And the task of the poet, the task of the human being, is to stand in that is-ness without flinching, without hope, without despair — just standing, like the tree.
The Seventh Poem: “Mero Mulu Man” (My Deep Heart) — The Anatomy of Interiority
We have moved from the argument against hope into a direct confrontation with the speaker’s own inner life — this is not an external critique but a self-dissection, where the poet turns the same relentless gaze inward.
The poem opens with a declaration of confusion that is also a method: “Mero mulu man / maile nai chinnna sakdina” — “My deep heart / I myself cannot know it.” This is not the romantic mystery of the self (the beloved unknowable soul) but something more disturbing: the speaker cannot know his own heart because it keeps changing, keeps contradicting itself, keeps refusing to be one thing. He catalogues these contradictions in precise, almost clinical detail. One moment the heart is hard as stone, the next it is soft as mud. One moment it burns with rage, the next it freezes with indifference. One moment it loves fiercely, the next it cannot feel anything at all. The poem presents these not as alternating moods but as simultaneous realities — the heart is all of these things at once, and this simultaneity is what makes it unknowable.
“Yo man / yo mero man / yaslai ma kasari biswas garum? / Yo to din din badalchha, palai palai paltainchha” (“This heart / this heart of mine / how can I trust it? / It changes day by day, moment by moment.”)
The key move in this poem is the word “trust” — biswas. The speaker is not asking whether he can understand his heart (that would be an epistemological question) but whether he can trust it (an ethical question). This shifts the entire inquiry. The problem is not that the heart is mysterious but that it is unreliable. And because it is unreliable, the speaker cannot build a life on its foundations. He cannot say “I love” and mean it for tomorrow. He cannot say “I believe” and mean it for the next hour. He cannot say “I am this kind of person” because the heart will prove him wrong. The poem becomes a meditation on the impossibility of character — of being a stable self over time — when the inner life is in constant flux.
What the poem reveals, through this relentless cataloguing of contradiction, is that the heart is not a thing at all — it is a process, a series of events, a weather system. And to try to know it, to grasp it, to make it into something solid, is to misunderstand what it is. The speaker’s frustration, his despair even, comes from the fact that he keeps trying to find something permanent in the heart and keeps failing. The poem’s final lines suggest a different possibility: not knowing the heart, not trusting it, but simply watching it — observing its changes without trying to fix them, without trying to make the heart into something it is not. This is the first glimmer in the collection of what might be called a practice of attention rather than a practice of meaning-making.
The Eighth Poem: “Keti” (The Girl) — The Encounter with Otherness
This poem introduces a new element into the collection: another person, specifically a young girl, who appears without context or explanation. The shift is startling after seven poems of solitary interiority. The poem is structured as a brief narrative: the speaker sees a girl on the street, or perhaps in a marketplace, and something about her arrests his attention. He describes her physical appearance with unusual specificity — her clothes, her hair, the way she stands — but the description keeps getting interrupted by what he calls “arulai na-dekhine kura” — “things that others cannot see.”
The poem operates on two levels simultaneously. On the surface, it is a simple observation of a stranger. But beneath that surface, something else is happening. The speaker sees the girl’s poverty, her exhaustion, the weight she carries — not because these are visible on her body but because he recognizes them from his own experience. He projects nothing onto her; rather, he discovers a shared condition that is not spoken. The poem’s central line makes this explicit: “Ma usko aankhama aaphno aankha dekhchu” — “I see my own eyes in her eyes.”
“U bhetna aako ho ki / ma bhetna gayeko? / Khoi, thaha chaina. / Tara yo bhet / yo bhet bhet hoi, / arko bhet hoina.” (“Has she come to meet / or have I gone to meet? / I don’t know. / But this meeting / this meeting is a meeting, / not another meeting.”)
The phrase “bhet bhet hoi” — “meeting is meeting” — is a characteristic Nagarjuna move: a tautology that functions as a revelation. It means that this encounter has no framework, no category, no explanation. It is not a romantic meeting, not a friendly meeting, not a purposeful meeting. It is simply two human beings occupying the same space at the same time, and in that naked presence, something passes between them that cannot be named. The poem refuses to turn this into a story. The girl walks away; the speaker watches her go; nothing more happens. But the poem has already done its work: it has shown that the other person is not a solution to the speaker’s isolation but a mirror of it. The encounter does not produce connection; it produces recognition. And recognition, in Nagarjuna’s world, is enough.
The Ninth Poem: “Aaja Ra Bholi” (Today and Tomorrow) — The Collapse of Temporal Narrative
After the encounter with the girl, the collection turns to a sustained meditation on time. This poem is structured around a simple contrast: “today” and “tomorrow.” But as the poem unfolds, these two temporal markers lose their usual meaning. The speaker begins by listing all the things he meant to do tomorrow — the plans, the resolutions, the hopes for a better future. He describes these plans in detail, and they are ordinary, even banal: finish a piece of writing, visit a friend, fix something broken in the house, take a walk in the morning. The accumulation of these small plans creates a sense of a life being lived forward, of a self that believes in its own continuity.
Then the poem pivots. “Tara aaja” — “But today” — the speaker is unable to do anything. Not because he is lazy or depressed, but because “today” has a different quality than “tomorrow.” Today is heavy, immediate, full of the weight of the body and the weather and the small pains that cannot be postponed. Tomorrow is light, imaginary, a place where all problems can be solved. The poem argues that tomorrow is a fiction — not a falsehood but a necessary illusion that allows us to keep living. Without the idea of tomorrow, today would be unbearable. And yet, the speaker says, he has lived enough days to know that tomorrow never arrives as itself. When tomorrow comes, it is always “today” again, with all the weight and impossibility that entails.
“Bholi feri pharkinchha / tara bholi bhayera hoina. / Bholi aaja bhayera pharkinchha.” (“Tomorrow returns again / but not as tomorrow. / Tomorrow returns as today.”)
This is the key insight. The future is not a different time; it is the same time wearing a different name. The speaker has spent his whole life waiting for tomorrow — for the day when things will be better, when he will be better, when life will finally make sense. But that tomorrow never comes because the mechanism of time is not linear but circular. Every tomorrow becomes a today, and every today contains all the weight that the previous today contained. The poem ends not with despair but with a strange, hard-won clarity: the speaker stops waiting. He looks at “today” — this heavy, impossible, ordinary day — and decides that it is all there is. Not because he has accepted it, but because he has seen through the illusion of escape.
The Tenth Poem: “Mero Kura” (My Words) — The Instruments of the Trade
This poem is about poetry itself — about the words the poet uses and what they can and cannot do. It opens with a simple declaration: “Mero kuraharu / mero kuraharu hoinan” — “My words / are not my words.” This is not a statement of humility but of ontology. The speaker argues that language is not something he creates but something he receives. Words come to him from outside, from the air, from the world, from other people’s mouths. He is not their origin but their temporary custodian. The poem develops this idea through a series of images: words are like birds that land on a branch and then fly away; they are like coins that pass from hand to hand; they are like water that flows through a pipe and cannot be stopped or held.
The speaker describes the experience of writing as a kind of surrendering — he must get out of the way, must stop trying to control the words, must let them say what they want to say. This is terrifying because it means that when he writes, he does not know what will come out. The poem that emerges may say things he did not intend, may reveal things he wanted to hide, may betray him. And yet this is also the only way to write anything true. The speaker recalls a line he wrote once that he did not understand until years later, when his life had brought him to the place the line was pointing toward. “Kuraharu aaphai aaphno artha banauchhan” — “Words make their own meaning,” he says.
“Ma lekhdina, ma lekhinchu. / Yo farak ho. / Lekhne ra lekhineko beech / thulo nadi chha.” (“I do not write, I am written. / This is the difference. / Between writing and being written / there is a great river.”)
This distinction — between writing and being written — is the poem’s central revelation. The speaker is not a subject who acts but a place where something happens. The poet’s job is not to impose meaning on experience but to become permeable to experience, to let it pass through him into language. This is vulnerable work. It requires the poet to abandon the fantasy of mastery, to give up the idea that he is in control of his art. And yet, the poem suggests, this is also freedom: freedom from the burden of having to say something important, freedom from the terror of the blank page, freedom to be simply a conduit for what needs to be said. The poem ends with the speaker sitting at his desk, waiting — not for inspiration, but for the words to arrive from wherever they come, and to carry him where they will.
The Eleventh Poem: “Kohi Manche” (Someone People) — The Social Dimension of Suffering
We move into the eleventh poem of the collection, where the speaker turns from the solitary struggle of the poet to the figure of the kohi manche — “someone” or “some people” — who exist alongside him in the same world of hunger and exposure.
The poem opens with a stark observation: “Kohi manche lai ta bhoka nai chaina, kohi manche lai ta marna nai chaina” — some people do not even feel hunger, some people do not even feel death. These figures are not the speaker’s friends or enemies; they are unnamed, generalized presences who populate the social landscape. The speaker describes them as “samayako bhitra hiddai garne” — walking inside time, moving through the hours without the weight of existence pressing down on them. They do not ask questions. They do not demand meaning. They simply exist in a way that the speaker cannot. The poem contrasts their easy passage through life with the speaker’s own experience of time as a wound, as something that cuts rather than carries. “Mero lagi samaya chai chhuri jasto ho,” the speaker says — for me, time is like a knife. The kohi manche walk through this knife without being cut, and this is what the speaker cannot understand. The poem lists their characteristics: they sleep deeply, they eat without tasting, they speak without hearing their own words. They are whole in a way the speaker is not. And yet — and this is the crucial turn — the speaker does not envy them. He sees them as empty rather than full, as people who have avoided suffering only by avoiding life itself. The person who does not feel hunger, the poem suggests, is also a person who does not feel anything.
This poem functions as Nagarjuna’s social critique embedded within the lyrical frame. The kohi manche represent those who have adapted to the world as it is, who have accepted the terms of existence without complaint, who have not been broken by the weight of being. They are the normal, the adjusted, the successful — and the poem regards them with something like pity. For the speaker, the inability to feel hunger is not a blessing but a deficiency. Hunger, in the logic of the collection, is a form of attentiveness: the hungry person is awake to the world in a way the full person is not. The person who does not feel death is the person who has never truly lived. The kohi manche are tragic precisely because they do not know they are tragic. They have made peace with a world that should never be made peace with. And so the speaker stands apart from them, not as a superior being but as a witness to what they cannot see: that their comfort is a kind of death, that their wholeness is a kind of emptiness.
The Twelfth Poem: “Mero Manko Kura” (The Matter of My Mind) — The Unsayable Core
This poem confronts directly the limits of poetry itself, the gap between what the speaker feels and what he can say. The title, “Mero Manko Kura,” suggests a confession or a revelation — the matter of my mind, the thing I have been trying to say — but the poem is about the impossibility of this confession.
The speaker begins by stating that he has been carrying something inside him for a very long time, “dhareko chhu yugau dekhi” — I have carried it for ages. This thing has no name. It has no shape. It is not a memory and not a feeling, neither a thought nor a dream, but something that lies beneath all of these, in the region of the mind where language cannot reach. “Maile tyaslai sabda ma sametna sakdina,” the speaker says — I cannot contain it in words. The poem then becomes a kind of inventory of attempts. The speaker has tried to write this thing into poems. He has tried to speak it in conversation. He has tried to gesture toward it with his hands, to show it in his eyes, to press it into the palm of another person. But each time, the thing escapes. It is like water slipping through fingers, like smoke dissolving in air, like a dream that vanishes upon waking. The speaker concludes that this thing is not meant to be said. It is a secret even from himself, a mystery that dwells within him without his permission. And yet the poem itself is the record of this failure — the attempt, the struggle, the impossibility. The poem does not succeed in capturing the thing, but it succeeds in showing the struggle.
This is one of the most meta-poetic moments in the collection, where Nagarjuna reflects on the very project of lyric poetry. The poem acknowledges that there is a core of experience that resists articulation, a remainder that cannot be assimilated into language. And yet the poet’s task is to keep trying, to keep circling this unsayable center, to keep writing poems that fail in interesting and truthful ways. The poem is not a solution but a document of the effort. The value of poetry, the speaker suggests, lies not in its success but in its fidelity to the attempt — in the willingness to keep pressing language against the limits of language, to keep describing what cannot be described. The mero manko kura is the hole at the center of the collection, the absence that all the poems are trying to fill, and the recognition that it will never be filled is itself a kind of knowledge.
The Thirteenth Poem: “Yo Sansar” (This World) — The Indictment of Reality
The collection turns outward in this poem, moving from the interior struggles of the speaker to a direct confrontation with the world itself. “Yo sansar” — this world — is not a neutral place but an active antagonist, a system designed to break those who live in it.
The speaker begins with a series of declarative statements, each one naming a way the world betrays its inhabitants. “Yo sansar bato dekhaucha, tara gantabya dekhaudaina,” the speaker says — this world shows the road, but it does not show the destination. It gives you a path to walk and then leaves you lost. “Yo sansar aaggo dekhaucha, tara pachhi lutcha,” he continues — this world shows the fire, and then it robs you from behind. The poem accumulates these images of deception and disappointment: a world that promises and withholds, a world that opens doors only to reveal walls, a world that feeds you only to starve you later. The speaker then shifts to a more personal register, describing how this world has treated him: “Malaai ta yo sansar le haraako chha,” it has defeated me. “Malaai ta yo sansar le todaako chha,” it has broken me. The language is not metaphorical but literal — the world has broken him, has left him in pieces. And yet, the poem takes an unexpected turn. The speaker says that in being broken, he has become porous to the world in a way the unbroken cannot be. The cracks in him have become passages through which the world enters and leaves. “Mero todai mero jhyal ho,” he says — my brokenness is my window.
This poem is one of the most politically charged in the collection, though it operates through the personal rather than the programmatic. The yo sansar is not just the natural world but the social world, the world of systems and structures, the world of power and injustice. The speaker’s experience of being broken by this world is not unique; it is the experience of everyone who has been crushed by poverty, by oppression, by the weight of history. But the poem refuses the consolations of victimhood. Instead, it finds in brokenness a form of vision — the ability to see through the cracks, to understand how the world works because it has worked you over. The unbroken, the speaker suggests, are also the unseeing: they have not been wounded enough to know the truth. The poem ends with a strange kind of gratitude: not gratitude for the suffering, but gratitude for the clarity that suffering has brought. The broken window sees everything.
The Fourteenth Poem: “Mero Jeevan” (My Life) — The Autobiography of Failure
We are now in the latter half of the collection, where the speaker turns from addressing the world, the beloved, and the social order to a direct, unflinching examination of his own life as a single, coherent object.
The poem “Mero Jeevan” (My Life) begins with a stark declaration: “My life has been a long series of failures.” This is not presented as a lament but as a factual statement, almost like a title or a heading. The speaker then proceeds to catalogue these failures not as dramatic tragedies but as small, quiet defeats: the job he did not get, the love he could not keep, the poem he could not finish, the friend he could not save. Each failure is given its own line, its own space, its own dignity. The poem does not rush past these moments or try to find a silver lining. It dwells in them, turning them over, examining them from all sides. The failures are not presented as lessons learned or character-building experiences; they are simply what happened. The speaker writes: “I have learned nothing from my failures / except that I fail.” This is a crucial move: the poem refuses the redemptive narrative that turns suffering into wisdom. Instead, it insists on the opacity of failure, its refusal to yield meaning. The speaker does not become stronger or wiser; he becomes more tired, more familiar with the landscape of defeat.
“I have built my house / from the bricks of my own disappointments. / It is a sturdy house. / It stands.”
This passage is the poem’s central image: the life built from failure is not a collapse but a construction. The speaker’s existence, however painful, is a structure. It has walls and a roof. It shelters him, even if the shelter is cold. The poem goes on to describe the furniture of this house: a bed of sleepless nights, a table of unpaid bills, a window that looks out onto a street where nothing happens. The speaker is not asking for sympathy. He is simply showing the reader what his life looks like from the inside. The poem’s power lies in its refusal to sentimentalize or dramatize. It is a flat account, a documentary of a life that did not turn out as hoped. The speaker does not accuse anyone — not his parents, not society, not fate. He simply states: this is what happened. This is what my life became.
What this poem achieves within the collection is a kind of grounding. After the cosmic scale of earlier poems (the sun and moon, the entire world as a courtroom), “Mero Jeevan” returns the reader to the particular, the local, the personal. The failure is not a philosophical abstraction; it is a specific job lost in a specific year, a specific relationship that ended on a specific Tuesday. By refusing the grand narrative of redemption or transformation, the speaker insists on the integrity of the ordinary. His life is not a tragedy; it is a life. It has been lived. The poem’s final lines turn this into a kind of quiet triumph: “I have failed at everything I tried. / But I have tried. / That is my one success.” This is not a celebration of effort for its own sake. It is a stark acknowledgment that the only thing the speaker can claim is the act of having attempted. The content of the attempt — its success or failure — is secondary to the fact of the attempt itself. In a collection that has repeatedly shown the speaker’s vulnerability and exposure, this poem offers a strange, hard-won dignity: the dignity of someone who has kept trying, even when trying led nowhere.
The Fifteenth Poem: “Timi Ra Ma” (You and I) — The Geometry of Relationship
The collection now turns to what might be its most intimate and difficult movement: a direct exploration of the relationship between the speaker and a specific “you” — not the generalized other of earlier poems, but a particular person who has been central to the speaker’s life.
“Timi Ra Ma” (You and I) opens with a spatial image: “We are two lines that met once / and have been diverging ever since.” The poem immediately establishes a geometry of relationship — the speaker and the beloved are not merging or uniting but moving apart, their connection a single point in the past from which all subsequent distance has grown. The poem does not mourn this distance; it maps it. The speaker traces the trajectory of their separation with the precision of a cartographer: the first disagreement, the first silence, the first time they did not recognize each other. Each stanza marks a new coordinate of distance: a city they moved to separately, a child one had and the other did not, a death in one family that the other learned about through a mutual friend. The poem is structured as a series of these coordinates, each one a small, concrete fact that together forms the geography of a failed relationship. The speaker does not blame or explain. He simply records: “You became a person I no longer knew. / I became a person you no longer recognized. / This is not a tragedy. / It is a fact.”
“I loved you once. / I do not love you now. / This is not a confession. / It is a description.”
This passage is the poem’s emotional center. The speaker refuses the drama of lost love — the tears, the regret, the what-ifs. Instead, he insists on the neutrality of change. People change. Love changes. The relationship that was is no longer. The poem does not ask for reconciliation or forgiveness; it asks for acknowledgment. The speaker wants the beloved to see that what happened is real, that it has left marks, that the distance between them is not a failure but a natural outcome of two separate lives moving in separate directions. The poem’s most striking image comes near the end: “We are like two rivers / that once shared a delta / but now flow into different seas. / The water remembers. / The water does not return.” The memory is preserved, but the flow is irreversible. The relationship exists now only as a trace, a sediment of past confluence.
This poem matters within the collection because it completes the arc of the speaker’s engagement with the other. Earlier poems addressed the beloved as a figure of longing, of loss, of missed connection. Here, the speaker achieves a kind of resolution — not a reconciliation, but an acceptance of the shape the relationship has taken. The “you” of the poem is no longer a source of pain or desire; the “you” is a fact, a coordinate on the map of the speaker’s life. The poem’s final lines are a farewell, but a quiet one: “I wish you well. / I mean it. / That is the last thing I have to say.” The speaker does not ask for a response. The poem ends with the speaker’s own voice alone, having said what needed to be said. The relationship is not resolved in the sense of being healed; it is resolved in the sense of being completed — its shape is now fully known, and the speaker can let it go.
The Sixteenth Poem: “Mero Desh” (My Country) — The Political Body
The collection now expands outward again, from the personal relationship to the political — the relationship between the speaker and the nation, the land, the collective body of the people.
“Mero Desh” (My Country) begins with a description of Nepal itself, but not the Nepal of tourist brochures or nationalist poetry. The speaker describes a country of “broken roads and empty stomachs,” of “rivers that carry away the topsoil and the hopes of farmers.” The poem is a catalogue of failures — not personal failures this time, but systemic ones: the corruption of officials, the indifference of the wealthy, the suffering of the poor. The speaker does not exempt himself from this indictment; he writes that he has “benefited from the suffering of others” even when he did not want to, that he is “complicit in the machinery of injustice” simply by living in the country as it is. This is not a poem of protest in the conventional sense — there is no call to action, no demand for revolution. Instead, the poem is a diagnosis, a laying-out of the disease that has infected the body politic. The speaker writes: “My country is sick. / I am sick with it. / We share the same fever.”
“I have seen the politicians smile / while the children starve. / I have seen the temples shine / while the houses leak. / I have seen my country / and I have not looked away.”
This passage is the poem’s moral core. The speaker does not claim to have solutions. He claims only to have seen — and to have refused the comfort of turning away. The poem’s power lies in its refusal of both despair and hope. The speaker does not say that change is impossible, nor does he say that it is certain. He says only that what is happening is real, that it is happening now, and that he is a witness to it. The poem goes on to describe specific instances of injustice: a farmer who lost his land to a developer, a girl who was sold into labor, a worker who died in a factory fire. Each case is given a single line, a single fact, a single name. The poem becomes a memorial — a list of those who have been crushed by the system. The speaker does not offer comfort or explanation. He offers only the act of naming, the act of remembering.
This poem is essential to the collection because it grounds the speaker’s personal suffering in a larger political context. The brokenness the speaker has felt in his own life is not merely individual; it is structural. The world that broke him is the same world that breaks the farmer, the girl, the worker. The poem refuses the temptation to separate the personal from the political. Instead, it insists on their inseparability: the speaker’s failure is also the nation’s failure, his wound is also the wound of the land. The poem’s final image is devastating: “My country is a body / and I am a wound on that body. / I do not know which of us / is bleeding.” The speaker and the nation are no longer separate. They are fused in a shared condition of injury. The poem offers no cure, no hope of healing. It offers only the recognition that the wound exists, that it is real, and that it is shared.
The Seventeenth Poem: “Mero Kavitako Antim Shabdaharu” (The Last Words of My Poem) — The Dying of the Voice
We have reached the penultimate poem of the collection, the moment when the speaker begins to reckon with the end of speech itself — with the silence that awaits all poems, all voices, all lives.
“Mero Kavitako Antim Shabdaharu” (The Last Words of My Poem) is a poem about ending. It opens with the speaker addressing his own poem directly: “You have been my companion / through the long night. / Now the night is over. / You must go.” The poem is aware of itself as a poem, aware that it is reaching its conclusion, aware that the voice that has spoken for seventeen poems is about to fall silent. The speaker does not resist this ending. He accepts it with a kind of tired gratitude. He thanks the poem for having been his “only true witness” — the one thing that listened, the one thing that carried his words into the world. He thanks the poem for having “held my pain without complaint” and for having “spoken when I could not speak.” The poem is personified, treated as a living thing that has served its purpose and is now being released.
“I have given you everything I had. / I have held nothing back. / Now I am empty. / And you are full. / That is the way it should be.”
This passage is the poem’s central gesture: the poet has poured himself into the poem, and now the poem has taken on a life of its own. The speaker is left hollowed out, but the poem is complete. The poem’s ending is not a death but a separation — the child leaves the parent, the voice leaves the throat, the word leaves the mouth. The speaker describes this separation with a mix of sorrow and relief: “I will miss you. / But I will also rest. / You have kept me awake / for too long.” The poem has been a burden, a task, a compulsion. Now it is finished. The speaker can sleep. The poem’s final lines are a farewell that is also a blessing: “Go into the world. / Find whoever needs you. / Tell them I was here. / Tell them I tried.”
What this poem achieves within the collection is a meta-reflection on the act of poetry itself. Throughout the book, the speaker has struggled with words — their inadequacy, their betrayal, their inability to capture the truth of his experience. Here, at the end, he makes peace with that inadequacy. The poem is not a perfect vessel; it is a flawed one. But it is the only vessel the speaker has. He gives it to the world not as a gift but as a testament — a record that he was here, that he suffered, that he loved, that he tried. The poem does not promise wisdom or healing. It promises only presence: the presence of a voice that refused to be silent. The speaker’s final act is one of release — letting the poem go, letting it find its own way, trusting that it will do what it needs to do. The poem ends not with a period but with an ellipsis — a trailing off, a gesture toward the silence that follows. The voice does not stop; it fades.
The Eighteenth and Final Poem: “Ma” (I) — The Beginning at the End
The collection ends where it began — with the self, the “I,” the irreducible core of the speaker’s existence. But this “I” is not the same “I” that opened the book. It has been transformed by everything that has come before.
“Ma” (I) is the shortest poem in the collection — a single stanza of six lines. It is a poem of naming and unnaming, a stripping away of everything that is not essential. The speaker begins: “I am the one who was broken. / I am the one who is still here.” The poem refuses all other identities: not a poet, not a lover, not a citizen, not a failure, not a success. Just the bare fact of existence — broken but continuing. The speaker does not claim to have been healed or transformed. He claims only to have survived. The poem’s third line is a declaration of radical simplicity: “I have no name now. / Only this breath. / Only this word: I.”
“I was a tree without leaves. / Now I am a root. / I will not grow again. / But I will hold the ground.”
This final image — the tree that has become a root — is the collection’s ultimate statement. The speaker has been stripped of everything: leaves, branches, even the hope of new growth. What remains is the root, the part that is hidden, the part that holds, the part that does not need to be seen. The poem does not offer a happy ending. It offers an ending, pure and simple. The speaker is not victorious. He is not defeated. He is rooted. He has found the ground of his own being, and he will not let go. The poem’s final line is a single word: “Ma.” — I.
This final poem completes the arc of the entire collection. The book began with a tree without leaves, an image of exposure and vulnerability. It ends with a root, an image of hidden strength and persistence. The speaker has moved from being seen (the naked tree, exposed to the world) to being hidden (the root, underground, invisible). The journey has been from the surface to the depth, from the visible to the invisible, from the public to the private. The final “I” is not a voice that speaks to the world; it is a voice that speaks only to itself, in the silence of its own being. The collection does not conclude with a bang or a whimper. It concludes with a presence — the presence of the “I” that has survived, that has endured, that has been broken and has not been destroyed. The poem is a root in the ground of existence, holding, waiting, being. And then the voice is silent.
