Five Poems by Mozid Mahmud

 

Doggerel of a sub-editor

 

Do I know you?

When at midnight from your body

Evaporates the ashes of a cacophony

Our automobile finds a throne in your naval pit

            like the indomitable horse of lame Tambour

Those who were awake slicing your body

at the transition of night and day

With a spell lulling them to sleep

you’re waiting for the emperor

And feasting on Diana’s flirtation and Liz Taylor’s wounded waist

I’m moving, creating, rattling sound

touching your very body

To what providence have you entangled me Jocasta

Wrapping me round the tail like a she-serpent

you’re pushing me to its mouth

On your fishy flesh congeals the waxy moon

My feet glue to the viscid proponents

On my head fly seven hundred and fifty vultures

Still I think of a useless effort to desert you

 

The village where I was born

there a river divides our body like a genital

incubated our childhood

in that river witch-daughters would wash their faces

For the dry river they are now rushing to you

Resting them to sleep with a venomous bite

what tricky buff you’ve started this with me

Before a flock of crow’s caw

I’ve no release from this wound this billowing darkness

Now who’s it that sleeps on the right of my bed

 

The time I touch my door everyday

a cat hides up the cornice silently

I repose on its abandoned fur

inhaling the odor of its sweat

and forget the slumber of sipping you

Lulling me to sleep you again take on the job of

                                                breeding cacophonies

 

Crow

 

The people of Asia call crows ugly and the moon lovely

Perhaps they themselves are dark and the moon is their colony

Colony means the sycophant, who has no light of his own

Whose body is rugged, full of wounds

Yet a colony lives in stories, crows in contrast

Are hardworking, organized. They gulp down

As soon as they see filthy foul rubbish

Because they want to keep the earth clean

 

Home

 

My home is my ignorance

Home takes me nowhere, only brings back

Waking up I long to go somewhere far away

Walking all day restless, at night

Where I find myself is home

In reality home is unreal, a metaphor

Where humans lost themselves

Those known faces, household bowls

A world of smells and sights

The daughter who called her father

The woman who slept beside

The scent of their memories

Is calling me as a blind dog

Home is an orbit

Planetoid for humans

Rotate in the same cycle

 

Pica Toro

Before the night rolls in Pica Toro has lost his bow

Take him along, little crow; do not turn him away from the buffalo feast

You were the blood brother of trees

Your mother, father and grandparents too

Long ago came out through a plucked mango seed and stood upright

So that misery stays away from you; sitting your romping children on the water

The river moved vigorously; they offered you the bark clothing

To cover the birth of time beforehand

Yet when the gun god stripped the barks you could not stop it

Through the fall of the trees you were the first food of men

 

Fallen Leaves

 

As you were rolling over the fallen leaves, rain drops--striking a Kadima flower-- were splashing all around you. Rolling under a grass, tenderly you were moving further down from the soft silky soil to the earth. I, too, like a prince, am heading toward the bed of sea following your secret drive. Every night steps out a monster of a container and scorches the princess’ breasts with its fiery tongue. 

Mozid Mahmud is a poet, novelist, and essayist based in Bangladesh. Some of his notable works include In Praise of Mahfuza (1989), Nazrul – Spokesman of the Third World (1996), and Rabindranath’s Travelogues (2010). I have been awarded the Rabindra-Nazrul Literary Prize and the country’s National Press Club Award, among others.