Intervening Outcry Poem by Hassanal Abdullah

Screams echoed in the palm of my right hand
as if a bullet hit the plaster on a wall—

Then, it was deep at night
on the highway, a few steps away
from my door, the vehicles shooting quickly by...
Lately, this torture has become tolerable, acceptable;
it has clung to my life, like day and dark.
So the intervening outcry, sometimes, drifts beyond
like a millennium baby somersaulting...
my fever-prone poisoned body aggravates.

Who else takes great care of my condition?
Who is senior or measured a few meters short
like a poet of lower caliber for the time being?
Who writes poetry taking this into account?
If the nature of dust, food, spade or plough
is simple and easy,
then national uplifting breaks out in the village.
Taking up such a trivial debate,
the pen stops scribbling of its own accord.
The intervening outcry turns aside,
then it’s at all useless to judge
the Irish influence on Tagore’s songs
or the conversion of Indian myth in “The Waste Land.”

Translated from the Bengali by Siddique M. Rahman