The
Wonderful Ramp-Girl
I could guess every niche of your glaring
flashing
Exquisite treasure of physique in that
intoxicating evening
And ruminated on the mythical nymph
That was hallowing your nakedness by her benedictions.
There was almost nothing hidden in your
existence,
You’re too open and exposed
Even it was so hard for the delighted
point-like fly around you
To take shelter in a corner of your
slippery figure.
With all your openness you’re dazzling the
eyes
Of the throng of the glamor-thirst
audience.
As you approached like a blazing comet
Penetrating the curtain of the melancholic
lights
All the onlookers began to devour your
famous charm.
The tremor of your stillness silenced
everyone,
You generated such an aura of peerless
ambience.
Your rhythmic stepping felt like
The dreamy sequences through a mysterious
Milky way.
The only thing never revealed and
Ever wrapped and concealed by your
top-to-toe openness
Was your heart.
But the compound eyes of the photographers
Diffracted their Roentgen-rays on you
To unveil that too!
Juxtaposition
10 May 1933
The regimented occultists of hatred
assailed in command.
They butchered and hacked down
The innocent books to the dusts of
nothingness.
Not 20,000 books but 20,000 souls they had
been—
Even the weight of one stone seemed
unbearable,
There Walter intensely illuminated through
day and night.
Gide was dumbfounded spectating
The bitterness of the world.
14 February 1989
Having flown from Berlin to Tehran
The ghosts kicked off a fire-festival
Where all the moist of love got dried up—
St. Valentine forgot to bewail.
This thought petrified me
So I conserved my verses in a hide-out
Of an iron-chest.
Who knows
Someone might approach clandestine
To wreck my homestead
To keep on searching tirelessly
The hidden book of mine!
Grandma
Look,
that’s my Grandma,
To
her we’re the inhabitants of a land
Where
age never raises,
Where
all the hands of the clock
Come
to a standstill.
My
father, me and my children
All
are babies to her.
We
understand everything,
State,
society, religion, mingling, norms etcetera
Even
the stoic matters in the adversaries of selfishness.
But
Grandma admonishes
We’re
the obliged listeners.
We
get advices on many things:
How
to cross the road that is jammed
With
myriads of vehicles,
How
to be calm and cool against all odds,
How
to swim to reach the bank
Leaving
the hungry crocodiles behind.
Her
freckled face reminds me
Of
the wise men of the old.
We
take her words as if from Tiresias
Without
showing a tiny bit of derision and disbelief.
In
our old days she opens her heart-box
To
let loose the tales of warmth and joy
That
would warm us, the listeners.
Maybe
my father or maybe myself
Shuffle
about questing for our own footsteps there
In
those paths and alleyways of the words.
We
are all grown-ups
But
when Grandma arrives
We
all become babies,
Babies
of different times!
Mohibul Aziz was born in Jessore, Bangladesh in 1962. He permanently lives in Chattogram where he is a Professor of the department of Bengali Language and Literature, University of Chittagong. He is the author of nearly sixty books of various genres such as fiction, novel, essays and poems. All of the books are in Bengali. Private Moments and Resurrection of a Reformist are his books of poems in English.
Excellent poems. Best wishes.
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