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by: Sofiul Azam
| “Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit.” – | | from The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot | | Summer, that’s a hard facer
in this tropical heartland’s North
where the Padma’s once-wild flow slugs –
a spineless python dragging its dull
burden into the Bay of Bengal,
where dust’s long maddening wait
for a little moisture seldom ends
or withered trees’ branching out
in green again hardly happens.
Anyway, look over there
a dry man in a dry month slouching
past North’s thirsty pleading;
(in his heart, dormant geysers
awaiting their burst into the open)
but still his past peeps through
the skin of a hard-pressed
custodian of drought scenes,
once a connoisseur of Kalidasa’s
fabulous The Cloud-Messenger, the hard-
cover with feelings of monsoon
not even lost in translation,
and of his artistry in Sanskrit
so steady in his Aryan elevation,
he is on the lookout again
for harbinger-clouds crowding
neat as his beloved’s tuft of dark hair,
and for sprinkling summer rain-
drops like womanly cool caresses
on his sweating figure. Oh, it’s
clouds that gather, and soon disperse,
leaving his hurting mouth sun-
dried for long odd weeks ahead. |
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