Mohammad Shafiqul Islam

Wishing you a happy new year! / The coming year? No, years ahead—

As if playing a game of chess / Still the world waits for the next dawn

Translated by Mohammad Shafiqul Islam

Leave a flower from your bun when you depart, my love.

In my deep sleep, you came, my love—

We’re still alive/ but they wanted to die a natural death

What’s life if a sense of darkness/ doesn’t connect night to sunlight

Nothing is meaningless if speech and silence  fill void, flowing in the same force, and no one blocks the road to dreaming.

Like a wounded bird, my songs/ tumble down at your feet, my love.

Dream is a mystery sometimes unfolded amidst creeping eeriness unstipulated to the seemingly compos mentis. As long as my stint in your thought bears a meaning for life because I wish to worship the sanctity of your feeling for me and tree,

Now I wonder the world is a painting, an imaginary chamber where captives sing, like a caged dove obeying a hunter enticing free birds to live in bliss. And then I see darkness of dusk fade away as the sun begins to peek in the east.

After so many years, more than a decade or so, when you pass my home, don’t forget to take a look at the humble roof of haystack and wattle if not the humble me waiting to have a look at your eyes for an epoch.

The map I dream drawing every day, Bangladesh, is yours.

Maybe you forgot, or dementia possessed you before our union—how else could you keep aloof from your soul, your other soul, your eupnoea?

Aaj O Agamikaal: Nirbachito Shakkhatkar (Daily Star Books, 2020) by Professor Serajul Islam Choudhury and edited by Emran Mahfuz, a young

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