#Mir Mahfuz Ali

[poems-from-around-the-world]

To Have My Sister Back - Mir Mahfuz Ali - Bangladesh

Deeba, did you know I went to your room yesterday looking for you?

The room was so dark I thought you were sleeping. I tiptoed, whispered your name in a hanged man’s voice – Deeba – Deeba – Deeba. But you did not reply. I drew the curtains to catch your eyes in the light, only to be disappointed.

You were not there only everything else that was yours: saris in the alna lipstick, hair clips, hair brush on the dressing table, finger marks on the mirror, shadowy, without intent, tablas on the almira tanpura and sitar leaning on the side of your bed.

It looked as though nothing visits your room but the pungent dust of the growing city that is trying to claim hold of your belongings.

An overpowering silence in the room, so overpowering in fact that I could hear your invisible hands still tapping the tablas you revered, so I picked up the tanpura and pulled its string to bring back a little melody to the room that died with you.

[forsoothsayer]

Midnight, Dhaka, 25 March 1971 by Mir Mahfuz Ali

I am a hardened camera clicking at midnight. I have caught it all: the screeching tanks pounding the city under the pressing heat, searchlights dicing the streets like bayonets, Kalashnikovs mowing down rickshaw pullers, vendor sellers, beggars on the pavements. I click on, despite the dry and bitter dust scratched on the lake-black water of my Nikon eye, at a Bedford truck waiting by the roadside, at two soldiers holding the dead by their hands and legs, throwing them into the back, hurling them one upon another until the floor is loaded to the sky’s armpits. The corpses stare at our stars’ succulent whiteness with their arms flung out as if to bridge a nation. Their bodies shake when the lorry chugs. I click as the soldiers laugh at the billboard on the bulkhead: GUINNESS IS GOOD FOR YOU SIX MILLION DRUNK EVERY DAY.

[themissingslate]

I will walk the sunset that loses itself in your plum-black water.

Mir Mahfuz Ali, When Bangladesh Floats in a Water-Hyacinth