Poems Poem by Mohammad Rafiq

1

you forgot everything
so easily

me, a dry broken branch

you, like an able housewife
feeding it to the oven’s flame

watching it burn, watching the cinders
you sighed with content

you forgot everything
so easily

2

brushing the lap
of your courtyard
the coy branch of the shojna
overspread with flowers

with the rocking of the gentle air
they’d scatter on the ground

i couldn’t have known

or this pillage
would never have been so deadly

forgive me

4

see that hawk flying alone in the long sky
that one hawk alone, in it the whole sky
a deserted field and on its breast one man alone
one man alone, in his breast a desolate field
the sunlight trembles
i’ll go on like this
with each other near
with each other far away very very far away

8

over your face the shadows of the sickly evening fall.
moist shadows; the boat lies nestling the bank
unused forsaken in the gentle cold the track across the field
the slow water its thin lazy waves
breaking in the evening a thin dim series slowing and dissolving
the twilight deepening in love joins its hands
in strong entreaty, surrounds you in the memory of a kiss
fear clings to the length of the body fear settles
eerily over your face the shadows gradually fall
some light some darkness some known and some unknown

the boat lies there nestling the bank alone.

[Translated from Bengali by Prasenjit Gupta]