Wake me up every morning as dawn becomes a new day.
What motivated our youth to defy death in order to free Bangladesh from the yoke of a brutal regime?
Glamorous lightweight raindrops from the October sky keep
A star fell on the ground in the windy night
As if playing a game of chess / Still the world waits for the next dawn
Don’t you see— I can only write dark.
The first pulse, in the midst of a whipping maelstrom,
Eternity collapses at the wheel of change. / Past is lost
August, marked with dying things. Summer’s end, / My freedom spent
A late summer in June,
Morning sun, and its endearing ardor swathes my spent body, I awake a ghost.
The poems ranged from mental health issues to individual freedom of expression and every musing in between.
The evening of September 8 at The Daily Star Centre saw an outpouring of verses to a live and very interactive audience. Daily Star Books and SHOUT jointly launched our series of Slam Poetry Nights—an evening, every month, of verses recited in the spirit of creative freedom.
The aim of a dohakar has always been to open the eyes of the masses. Many of the dohas written by the two prominent dohakars, Soroho-Pa and Kabir Das, have modernist, anti-establishment themes, criticising the social, political and religious conventions of their times.
He had lost touch almost completely with his craft, so much so that he wondered if he even had it in him. But even so, for the sake of writing, he wrote. When the pandemic hit, Helal batted off the dust of his desk and sat down to write. Sitting from a foreign land, the ink flowed again.
Poignant lines on wishful death
A love poem
Chulbul, who has written 29 books of poetry in his career spanning 9 months, characterises his style as introspective, post-modernist neo-absurdism.
Maybe I loved her so because we were daughters of the same soil, to some extent, at least. It made me smile. But I also sneered at myself a little bit, because her soil had also ripped apart mine for over 200 years.