Image Of Reflected Lines
Image Of Reflected Lines
Umpteenth times did I beseech you to come to me
But you didn't comply at all
Severing the bond with mountains, forest and sea
You didn’t come to Dhaka with me.
Do you remember Kavita,
That day you and me
Leaning on the dome if clouds
watched together
The ocean's immense coexistent millennial
waters
How beautiful!
You said softly.
I stepped down easily deep inside the sea
To discover you
After a while,
I surfaced with some colorful words
You said, “knot them in a string,”
And I obeyed.
And thus was created
A female statue in your style
Thereafter, when I see a woman
I call her Kabita, Oh Kabita.
But never you were jealous
Nor your eyes showed any tinge of shyness.
Kavita do you still
Swim in the clear water of Karnafully river?
Or, sitting in ravines of red soils
Enjoying the moisture laden breeze?
Once upon a time,
you could not sleep in the scent of delphinium
You would say,
Let's die holding this beauty to our heart.
I used to laugh at your feminine traits.
Do you know dear,
I'm now a mechanical tangle in a city writhing in pain
Dollar and dinars are flying over my head
Dhaka city gives birth to hatred and anger every moment.
In the scuffle of gain and loss
No new poem touches my sky.
Emotions of past got erased from my mind
Though, emotions have no value in this city
People here are trapped in the hard chains of artificiality,
Love is constantly being polluted
There is no value of love
Love has been entrapped by the power of shillings
High mansions made of brick and stone
Cries like a silent spectator
Everyday in this city
Every highway is tired of indiscipline
Eyes of some women spritz
Molten lava of volcano
Floating in that lava
I stand straight with my spine without my knowledge
You know dear,
A shocking incident happened that day
I called your name seeing
A lady who looked just like you
I thought you have come to this city in search of me In some hour of night
To take back your poet
That lady looked at me all in rage
I felt like a new Romeo
Who escaped the manuscript of Shakespeare a while ago
Her eyes were hot like a furnace
Where the iron acrylic is refined
My feelings ruptured in a moment
My broken soul crumbled under her feet.
I sank in the pond of remorse
But emerged again
Due to an invisible gesture
My broken soul was mended
After my depressed feelings got rejuvenated
I saw some black blood clots all around
Understood when I came to this city
Human blood also turns black
The heart of a man gets ruined.
The machine to generate love
Everyday here in this city gets killed
The greens for no reason gets ruined in a moment
On the sidewalk in every lane
Conscience fades in hot breath
People are running like an ocean
But reaching the destination is just
an imagination
People may begin their journey
which never meets an end
Young generation is depressed for this endlessness
I watch in their eyes
Their broken pieces dreams.
Some poems like you
Whom I discovered in poetic cosmos
Wearily excavating their talents everyday
My city doesn’t tries to remember them.
Arin, Diba, Jinnat, Parveen
And many nameless cousins of yours
Whose ribs are lighted by abundance of rows
But this city eats sharks
Zarina, who just arrived from a village,
Sokhina, who was abandoned by her husband
Are engrossed in stitching their broken dreams
But there is also frustration of an endless wait
Oportunist vultures devour their dreams
This city is in pain beneath uncountable footsteps
Stifled as a defeated soldier
While walking along the sidewalks in midnight
I saw miseries lying parallel to each other
I heard cries of tangled untold tears
Sometimes I just sit in night’s balcony
And feel the waves of unseen people in my blood.
The flow of humans stuffed with emptiness
Approaching every day
I shiver at the thought,
If we don’t become alert now
Then one day this city will become unfit for settlement
Now as the vehicles snuggle together at every traffic light
Under the nose top of Traffic police
Then the whole city will just be filled with people in cars
There will be no empty space to move forward
Will stand like a static mountain
Hours after hours
day after day in one point.
When was this city born?
Who inherited this city
How many days ago, how many years ago
Someone says four hundred years
More! Shouts the other.
What was on this land in the earlier days?
Who was and how was it?
I want to know each and everything.
Do you know Kavita,
Oh my peaceful land embellished with mountains and sea
My soul has established a connection with this city
I talk to her in silence
I talk to her covertly
I wipe her overflowing eyes
She beseeches me
Poet, please put me on wheels
I will go to the village's greens
I will go to my mother surrounded by ponds, rivers and lakes
That is my true homeland
Shining like a full moon
Where among the morning’s hue spreading their feathers the birds fly.