In Folly's Cocoon Poem by Sofiul Azam

As darkness drops, I wonder what you have in store to say
when love or something like it darkens on every way.

What profit will you draw from a wild disease of the heart?
Then bathe you must in crow-black waters every single day.

So strange it sounds like despair itself speaks through me;
absurd if something out of the ordinary happens to stay.

This world no longer tunes in with a lover's way of life
for which oh, fool, a sum of suffering you have to pay.

Oh, many yesterdays I spent to know that love the witch
in disguise does caress with flames as on the stakes of hay.

If you have a glance at Majnun wailing in the wilderness,
will you still suggest each one face this passion's brightest ray?

This brightness sears the eye and burns everyone into ashes;
what use of these cool ashes but for scraping pots of clay?

You laugh away the warnings that I sprinkle upon you:
much bitter will this affair taste like salt from Bengal's bay.

I, too, did fall in love with a Gorgon of the stony stare;
it's love that leaves each and every thing in disarray.

Is it our fate that we must fall in love and suffer long
with none of the urges to block its temptations we may?

Beware of love that airy nothing swelling with legends:
I pity all the freaks of old not plague but love did slay.

Sofiul, don't forget the germs still coursing in your veins,
and where in folly's cocoon you like a caterpillar lay.


from IN LOVE WITH A GORGON (2010)