From Syed Shamsul Haque’s Stanzas of Summer & Spring

My city has turned off all its lights.

And then someone has muddied,

all the road-marks and signs.

The nameless by-lanes and roads

like shriveled intestines,

coil down into the belly of hope.

"How will you go home so late?"

"Shall I come with you?

"No, it's not necessary."

She had said that so long ago,

yet the words keep coming back again.

They ring in times of defeat. Smear me with

Holy ashes in moments of victory.

"Shall I come with you? Shall I come along?"

"Do you like these flowers?

You can take them."

"I don't even like flowers."

"That's so strange. Who doesn't love flowers?"

Flaming flowers in your hair,

saris trimmed in red,

you sing sitting at the foot of the old Oak

at Ramna, so many of you. 21

Yet how is it your feet are never

like wings of dove?

What strange agony drives Shyamal's sister

to suicide, in distant Kurigram?

She does it, she does it every day,

even till today; And even now out here,

the midnight express still whistles on.

What Tagore music has done for Bengal,

how hearts break, rumbles the bomber of dreams,

the silver door comes together,

bellies swell up in pregnancy

under a supernatural touch;

all these will wait for none.

"Before you make Bangla your own," they say,

"you will belong to Bangla."

Within the drought,

famine, revolution, snake-pits,

the shrill cry of the blue bird,

they shall turn into the eyes of the boat's prow

But I do not become one!

I am a slave of the celestial tobacco.

The more I lose faith, the more I sell

myself to the embrace of the smoke.

Syed Shamsul Haque was a Bangladeshi writer. He won the Bangla Academy Literary award in 1966, Ekushey Padak in 1984 and Independence Day Award in 2020 for his contribution to Bengali literature.

Afsan Chowdhury is a Bangladeshi liberation war researcher, columnist and journalist. He received Bangla Academy Award in the year 2018 for his contribution to the liberation war literature.