Poetry
POETRY / Of longings, of belongings
Women and the earth have to tolerate a lot. –Kaajal (1965)
POETRY / My heart is a gilded oligarch
My heart is an oligarch: A staunch, pot-bellied, knuckle-cracking middle-aged man lounging carelessly, lazily in his sitting room with his limbs spread out on a settee
POETRY / Unfaithful month
I spent the last night with your lover
POETRY / Jogphal
Healthy water-bodies are sunk by envy-blind waste’s outburst
Serendipity
Wake me up every morning as dawn becomes a new day.
WB Yeats’s ‘Easter, 1916’ and Bangladesh’s July 1-36, 2024
What motivated our youth to defy death in order to free Bangladesh from the yoke of a brutal regime?
POETRY / October: An unfinished poem
Glamorous lightweight raindrops from the October sky keep
POETRY / Silence
A star fell on the ground in the windy night
POETRY / Republic of the dead
As if playing a game of chess / Still the world waits for the next dawn
We’re still alive
We’re still alive/ but they wanted to die a natural death
Diasporic delusions
Self-confidence shaken, some shattered memories in their side bags
My scarlet incarnation
Being a woman comes to me naturally If not me, then who? I was never asked to be one I was never asked to cook
The Black Cat
This is a translation by Md. Abu Zafor of Bimal Guha’s “Kalo Biral” from the collection ‘E Kon Matal Nritya' (first published in 2022).
Sindbad
Time to set sail for a new cruise, oh dear voyager Sindbad!
My Son’s Shoes
Time, heavy as a thousand suns combined,/ Bends mothers, smaller than the ones they bore,
Bombardment
What’s life if a sense of darkness/ doesn’t connect night to sunlight
Little bits of love that remain
Your tea in the kettle, piping hot water/ No sugar, so that you can really taste the tea on your tongue
Bring humanity home alive
This universe’s heart is hollow now for humanity has died inside it.
Small-town Blues
Spacious, shiny, new roads are built in my city to rent them for raw-markets