Researcher's Blues Poem by Choman Hardi

Every day I try to lose them in the streets,
leave them behind in a bend in the road and keep on
walking. But they follow me everywhere, their voices
combining into a hum from which sentences rise and fall.
The woman I never interviewed cut the string of my sleep
at dawn, whispering: ‘I am not well'. Why didn't I listen
to her story? Why didn't I realise that she was dying?
The one widowed at 26 told me, ‘Imagine twenty
years of loneliness.' I remember her in the middle of
an embrace and start weeping. The pleading voice
of the woman who was raped echoes in my head:
‘I only wanted bread for my son.' I wish I had told her
that she is good, she is pure, not spoiled as she thinks she is.
Then I remember the old couple in their mud-brick house,
surrounded by goats and chickens. I remember their tears
when they talk about their children, when they remember
a woman who had been rich and powerful in her own village
but in Nugra Salman ‘she was stinking, abandoned,
worm-stricken'. What was the dead woman's name?
Why didn't I try to find her family? I keep walking away.
All I want is to walk without crying, without being
pitied by people who think that I have problems
with love, without the homeless man telling me that he is
sorry. I want to disappear, be unnoticed, unpitied.
Sometime ago when I started, it was all clear. I knew
what had to be done. All I can do now is keep walking,
carrying this sorrow in my soul, all I can do is
pour with grief which has no beginning and no end.