My Khayey Poem

From Google

Note: This poem is purely the product of my personal experience of a remote kind of hard, yet easy, comfortable, and free life. The countryside was it! How I spent nights chasing animals from the field crops. And in the end, the animals and I would be friends in the night. Animals like deer, when I make noises, are saved from the tiger.

Khayey (Sharchopa term): A stilt hut made of bits and pieces of wood, poles, leaves, etc., usually built as a guardhouse for farmlands.

It's hard—
hard in the rain or shine.
But it's free.
It's demanding—
calculating the yields and the meals—
but it's carefree.

A Khayey is thatched with banana leaves.
Through perforated leaves, I see the moon.
The moon is the king of the night,
just as wild animals are.

The Khayey itself is all naturally built:
tall poles, little poles, leaves of varieties.
In this nature, a human as I stand
with an insipid fire burning near my bed.

My maize plants surround the Khayey—
tall and tilting, they swing gently.
Sometimes waves are just under my feet.
Who protects?

Anyways, the fresh evening breeze keeps me fresh.
I can hear every tiny sound—
the sound of all insects and creatures,
the sound of the cuckoo,
the chatting of birds,
the sound of animals rushing beside the farmland.
It's their world.

Slowly the sounds die,
but my friends come to life—
not bothering whose crops they are destroying.
What do I have?
What do they have?

I shout, throw stones piled beside my head.
My guests sprint down for a minute or two.

But soon,
alas! Loud roars roar through the deep valley of the forest,
making different sounds.
There is commotion.
"My deer!" I cried.

And the only way to help them from the prey
is just to shout continuously.
I expect some of them to come near my Khayey
and take refuge.
But it is a two-way blockage.
It is an easy trap for a tiger,
and he would never leave without having one.

There is a painful cry of a deer for many minutes
as he drags it down the valley.

Oh dear, it is painful to have lost my favorite orange deer—
I saw her the previous evening—
and I believe it's all because of me,
because I chased her away from my field.
She came here for refuge.
If she sought refuge here,
then where is my refuge?

The sinking thought answers silently in the night.