এদিকে এ জীবন, ধীরে,

তবু এখনও চলছে

Even through my smallest sorrows,
my slipping joys,
my thoughts that are born abruptly,
you rise through everything
like a hush of wind.

You are the salty light
clinging to the unknowable white stone
like the scales of a fish.
Do I also rise day after day
within your chest
in the same soft stirring?

Today I will open no letters.
I will fold every waiting thing
and leave it in the drawer.

Today I am far from every hour that calls for me,

far from the crowd of people, far even from myself.

In some corner of the room, under the bed,

inside the old books, you will not find me today.

Today I will lie in such a posture
as if no one has called me for years.
I am a strange creature today, spread out
in this blue emptiness, as if Sunday had never been born at all.

23 November 2025

My small disappearance on Sunday

In such a silent world,

I wake from a sleep stiff as a fish

and find myself turned

to the quilt’s far side

where something unseen stirs without a sound

21 Nov 2025

Imagine that one day nothing remained.
These photographs, these books, these untidy stacks of writing,
the letters with their yellowed paper,
everything vanished one day,
no trace of identity left anywhere.

As much stillness as could fall upon the earth seemed to fall,
a faint human scent dissolved in the air,
and just that measure of silence settled over everything.

Imagine it.
Imagine that everything was written
in delicate ink.

15 Nov 2025

By then, the whole day will be spent just trying to hold together the broken pieces inside me.
Even so, I want to see my eightieth year.
I want to reach my ninetieth.

By then I will no longer want to hear any stories of sorrow, not yours, not of abandoned cities, not of the people left behind.
So much discarded sadness already lies around like water, like soil, like breathing itself, folded into the everyday.
Do not give me any new sorrow then.
Come and sit beside me, talk to me, but do not speak of decay.

If you like, we can talk about some river with all its windows open,
we can speak of those who go out walking with the heart of Jesus held to their chest,
whose weariness is not like other people’s weariness.

I want to see my eightieth year.
I want to reach my ninetieth.

Time will be riding on both my shoulders then, like quicksand,
yet I will still want to remember how blue the autumn sky was when I was twenty-three,
how the rain perfumed the nights when I was thirty-seven.

On that day, let me be as I am.

On that day, do not call me into any needless trouble.

One day, cutting through the crowd of this new life, it suddenly struck me
that I have settled upon the earth like a grain of sand– immeasurably vast, yet unseen.

What I see is mine, and what I have not touched is also mine. And yet,
in the preparations for the next river, the next tree, the next birth of a star,
I find myself small before an immense ocean.

All warmth, all vitality, all futile utterances– everything I see, everything I have touched, dissolves into the infinite;
like a season untouched by human footsteps.

Beyond the skies birds have cleaved,
beyond the dust that has gathered on human feet– far, far beyond all that,
like someone’s forgotten dream still glimmering,
an untouched call of a tiny starling still flows through my memory; I wonder who is it?

There were rivers, there were stars, there were seeds of pain cupped in human palms;

there were eyelids, there was the dust of desire unburdened by sorrow,

and there, poetry found a garden swollen with the emptiness of two eyes,

a garden thick with desire;

the old lust of the earth still stands at a distance and quietly sobs,

in this solitude, in this body-scented fog, waiting to give birth

like a field heavy with ripening.

And yet, even this torn and aching Earth carries a depth of peace of its own.

On this small planet of soil - crowded, named, layered with dust -

the skeleton of a bird no longer than a finger

still trembles alive in the inner veins of a leaf;

and amid all these happenings, a person's own kind of lust

persists in its own way.

Just as, at the end of the afternoon,
people sit side by side,
and somewhere in the distance a crow flies past,
just as the countryside slips by
through the window of a moving train,
just as earth clings to someone’s feet,
just as before dusk the boats arrive at the empty jetty and tie their ropes,
so are you.
That is how I see you.

Just as I see particles of torn light resting on palm leaves,
just as I see that violet parul blossom sitting in its hollow
like the lonely footsteps of a person,
I do not hear it, I see the soft murmuring of fields returning from harvest.
As I keep watching, my eyelids grow heavy,
and like the sunlight sliding down my cheek,
you slowly fade into me.

Beside a waterless, ancient well

a snake’s shed skin lay yesterday,

I see it’s still there today.

And here is this life, moving slowly,

yet still moving.

Too many words no longer please me; I prefer a life like a leaf submerged in water.

Is this release?

Or the beginning of another birth?

Everyone has headed home.

After a long while, I find you here, so near, glowing like a firefly in the dim evening, weighed down by the burden of this body, in exhaustion, decline, descent, and rejection;

In this enchanting city brimming with familiar dreams, you are the unforgettable essence...

Poetry is not always born on paper. Sometimes it hangs in the air, sometimes it enters someone's eyes. Sometimes it silently wanders from house to house, when night falls, without our knowledge. Poetry is born from within those cracks, the empty cracks that exist outside of language.

I never wanted so many roses in my life,

I wanted-

Let a rose or two bloom in the garden surrounded by the sun, surrounded by tin fences, with soft thorns, in a nest surrounded by the calm afternoon...

I wanted-

Let a sparrow or two come, let the morning dew wet the petals, in the crowd of leaves filled with branches...

The old man who sells tea on a street corner pours his sixty-year history of loneliness into twenty-five cups every day.

Do you pay for it?

Do you pay the price for a stranger's face?

In the eyes of a street dog-

his invisible respect for you,

do you know the cost of this silent devotion?

Apart from tailor's measurements, house rent, jobs - what else do you pay for?

Poetry means - where one person ends, another begins.

Poetry is a prayer for birth.

Poetry sits between the end of breath and the cessation of life.

Sitting there, he writes the poet himself.

There is another empire among humans where centuries pass in an instant.

There is another empire within man where he builds furniture and decorates cities.

There is such a geography within people, hanging like a drop of water for eternity-

If he dares to step forward

I set out to write of jubilation -

then, lofted by the fire, a shard of funeral ash

falls into the paper ;

halfway through the poem,

the Other arrives, and passes through.

A paper boat sails into the distance.

Is it aware -

where does the river find its rest, at which curve does the moss gather, where does the erosion take its toll?

Is it aware -

the erosion of that bank

isn’t merely a scar of soil?

If my age increases,

if my pace slows,

if the tight chapters of life come to an end,

let me become like dust and cloud then.

In the inner hush, through the constant stirrings within me

where you shimmer through the span of my life,

if one day you fall away

like light dropping into lament and dissolution,

that day I might have grown very old.

That day, let me be like a grain of dust,

so that with a fierce longing

I may draw you into myself.

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse