Three Poems by Mohibul Aziz

 

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.