Ochirbatyn .Dahsbalbar

***

My life is in the white grasses that sway in the wind,
My beautiful Motherland…
I want to purify my mind, give the flesh of my body to your green grasses!
I want to reach happiness, dissolve into the pure, transparent waters of your rivers!
Your eternal sky looks down upon me, oh my Motherland,
And I dry my tears with the grey clouds of the sky.
The Mongolian sun dazzles my eyes with gold,
And smiles like my son Gangabaatar.

I’ll play in the skirts of your sun-yellow mountains, oh my Motherland.
Grant me your life and your merit, oh my sacred mountains…
Sparrows sing in the evening air, send symphonies into my heart.
My mind grows close to Yanjinglhama, resounds with her golden zither.

The dung smoke from the ger draws a curtain in blue across the feet of your distant mountains.
Sheep and goats bleat, cows low, the clear air splashes, and
Truly, the children’s cheerful voices flows the river forth, and
Hardly a breeze sways at the top of the pines.
My meadow-scented mind of wind
Dissolves into the silky air…I know the story!

STANDING ON A WINDY HILL ONE AUTUMN EVENING

In ultimate slowness, these berrybrown hills have floated through time.
Faded grasses are sheltering this autumn evening from the bitter wind….
Like my brothers, these hills are used to the world to which they are come,
Like berrybrown birds, they feel the sanctuary of many, many mountains….

The bluegrey smoke of the gers spreads out over the hills.
The bluegrey stars shine in the hollows through the night.
Like grains of sand, the pale earth pours through my fingers.
And time will make my mind pure, like golden sand.

I lie amid the autumn grass and talk with the hills.
Under the silent skies, the nature of the eternally unspoken draws close.
I nod at what is said of bittersweet, of grasping what is too great, and
I feel the nature of the tiniest knolls through the hills upon the wild steppe.

We come to recognise one another, we start through vision to talk, and
Like two lovers, I and the hills become as one….
The hills are feeling the bitter cold this autumn evening, they seek shelter.
I love my mother Nature, who has made these moving hills for me.

The wisdom which completes the incomplete takes form among the hills,
And tears fall into my palm like drops of rain.
This autumn evening, the camels bellow and the withered grass is sad,
And in the sanctuary of the hills I seek refuge from the piercing wind.

My mind feels sad for me upon this living earth.
I hear an orphaned camel calf, bellowing through the years.
This autumn evening, I sit upon the hill like my grandfather, my legs crossed,
And I tell the rosary of my life through the melody of my thoughts.


***

A spring in a saltmarsh,
weeping like a camel’s eye, and
a line of cranes,
tethered like endless days –
they have cradled
my proud support, my motherland,
my own father.
A lake of tears,
aware of the meadow’s children, and
the secret mountains,
obscuring our homeland’s borders –
they have embraced
my heavenly seat, my motherland,
my own mother who bore me.
1996

TIME

Dark dark dark dark skies….
Endless endless endless endless time….
Beginningless beginningless, endless space, space….
Deserted deserted, nothing to match the time, the time….
Billowing on the limitless shore of space, of time’s great dark river,
the law, the people and towns, the sun and moon are afloat on this great
river.
But time prevails in this turning world, time is victorious.
The stars are, and they are not, and time connects all, washes all away.
Dark dark, the great river of time billows onwards….
Inconceivable inconceivable space, and here and there the fire of faith
flashes.
We are drowning in the river of vast time,
but do we not, with time, replenish our bodies?
Amid the silence of the not quite empty, not quite empty space,
the world’s sphere revolves, wearing itself away….
A single eye watches a leaf, me, floating on the river of time,
imagines it, unsevered from timelessness….
1979-1982


***

The white night is sleeping like a foal, resting its head on the rocks in the river. Not even the miserable donkey awakens it, nor the jangling iron cart of the water. Was this night sent by the khaan, like his belovèd lady is it resting here?
Not even the Buddha knows the answer. But, after the rain, sleep evades me. I am a young man, so I work at night. It’s like the needle of time. Night is flying, its wings white….
The cliffs gather close to the flow of the river, the night sleeps soundlessly. The lapdogs nearby fear waking it, they gather in their voices. The flow of the river lullabies the night with endless stories. A sudden shift might endanger the night. Far away it flies. I am thinking….Life is tough. The night sleeps, but how come I do not? If I slept, the night would kidnap me. The white night is sleeping like a foal, resting its head on the rocks in the river. Like a woman, this earth is waiting for an answer from Heaven!
1978

I LIVE BY COSMIC LAWS

I am living by cosmic laws.
By force of will, I was born to the reprobate earth, but I was birthed in truth by a star.
I am contained by the whole earth.
My life on earth is limited.
When the cord was cut, my breathing had rhythm.
Between the start and the finish,
how far I look behind, and stare ahead, is limited.
I live in the breath of the world.
My heart pounds out the beating of the stars,
my veins pulse with the whispering of water,
and the fire’s warmth blazes in my life.
I am living by cosmic laws.
I am granted destiny beneath the moon.
My breathing, thinking, walking on the earth
is limited exactly by the distant stars.
I hold my lover on a cold autumn night,
listening to the grass on the silent wild steppe.
And lips touching softly, and holding hands,
I remain upon the screen of the wide world.
The woman asleep in my lap,
there is no-one else knows this sweet moment.
This, my predestined fondness,
in the logbook of a hundred million years upon the earth.
We have both suffered under cosmic laws.
My body has ridden a multitude to get here.
The wind, storms, the wild steppe, stars by day, autumn knolls -
all that is in the round earth justifies me.
I am living by cosmic laws.
My prayers have made me man, not monkey!
Oh, lying down, I sigh, sigh oh my own powerlessness.
Up into the darkness I stare, and there is reconciliation!
A flame at night calms the whistling of the universe.
A woman holds you through nine months of gentle evenings.
In the boundless cosmos, I turn with the earth’s sphere,
in the myriad assembly of stars, I travel on, honoring the human form!
1983