translation: Biddut Khoshnobish
He said, ‘Well done.’
You said, ‘No, you’re absolutely wrong.’
He said, ‘This is life.’
You said, ‘It is not the meaning of life.’
He showed me a way.
You said, ‘The way is wrong.’
He is a stream of hope,
You are against the tide.
I am in great trouble--
You are as acceptable as him.
Which way shall I choose now?
In Dreadful Darkness
It is daytime now
And the sun is over my head
Nevertheless it is dark all around.
Not for the cover of the trees and their foliage
Not even for the veil of the tall buildings
Nevertheless it is dark all around.
Undoubtedly it is daytime now
But I can’t see you
Or anyone among you
I can’t even see myself.
The sun is still over my head.
For its violent rays
Or for its blinding light
We are in dreadful darkness.
Lies Become Truth
Lies become truth
In print and
The visible lies turn true, day by day.
Suspicion doesn’t exist here
Because we already believe--
The east is the west.
Erroneous outcome of our gain and loss
Brings no suspicion
Because our simple beliefs
Have already become lies, day by day.
The house isn’t mine,
I am just sitting inside.
The admiring words I do not deserve,
They belong to others.
The lady I am sitting next to isn’t mine,
So there’s no need to think I’m her sweetheart.
The car isn’t mine either,
I am just a passenger.
And the pause isn’t so far away, it is closer.
What a gamble with women, house and car!
Though their possession isn’t mine,
I own them just for the time being.
Thus I wander with bountiful admiration,
And thus I camouflage the rumors in the air.
The history of our gain and loss
Is like this in short.
If I get closer to the door
It shuts my way out.
And I hear the hullabaloo
On the other side of the open-window.
Standing alone at the closed door
I cannot make my way out.
But what a pity!
When I try to close it when returning home,
The open-door laughs and mocks me.
And it happens all the time.
When I want to go out, the door is closed.
When I come back home, the bond is gone.
Such a life, such a contradiction
I carry every day.
Our children have no fairy tales in their sylla-
bus.
The children of the 21st century
Do not read Aesop’s fables
Or, stories by Upendrakishore Raychowdhury.
Now-a-days, fairy tales are for the grown-ups
only.
And the politicians are constantly begetting
those fairy tales.
Mahmud Kamal är en poet och akademiker
bosatt i Tangail, Bangladesh
