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Noah's Ark
My nightmare squatting on the breast of sleep --in the small hours of last night
I lay watching: churning the three realms the deluge rises foaming and frothing, and my terror-stricken homeland --my Bangladesh -cowering beneath the raised paw of complete ruin.
Just then the great ark of Noah the prophet comes caressing the despondent horizon and lovingly docks at my head.
The mild instructions of ever-merciful Allah resounded in my distraught consciousness. In order to build a post-deluge community I picked up from Creation's motley throng one by one, in couples, whatever thrives in our homeland's discommoded soil: peasants, workers, students, intellectuals tycoons, merchants, grocers, ministers, sentries, bureaucrats, officials, newspapers and newsmen, policies and policy-makers, poets, artists, lovers;
with bated breath
I picked up a couple of country footpaths and a couple of hamlets.
Heaving a sigh of relief, as I was about to break into a song of regeneration addressed to the future motherland, the distressed conscience of the nation broke through the waves and begged me to restrain myself with gaze fixed on the crowded heart of Noah's ark. Following that gaze my two eyes abruptly staggered to a halt.
Both hands pressed to my head, I saw a fatal illness curled around the breast of my salvaged land, swinging merrily: malnourished peasant, deunionized worker, shortsighted students and intellectuals, bogus industrialists, merchants, grocers, thuggish minister, sentry, bureaucrat, official, newspaper crushed under bad news, newsman troubled by commercialism, unprincipled policy-maker, poet without prosody, painter without form, passionless lovers.
Even the carefree river is choked with sewage, the footpaths bear chest wounds, the hamlets are stricken with illness and sorrow.
Suppressing a cry of intolerable anguish, one by one, I threw the wretched cargo overboard into the omnivorous Currents of the deluge, and attempting to control a sigh like a python's hiss, my hand falling on the chest gave me a shock: other than variegated scars and impotent rage and the stifling pressure of faithlessness it felt nothing.
Raising limp hands in prayer to Khuda almighty.
1 begged forgiveness and plunged into the turbulent waves...
Bearing a void in its heart, .Hazrat Noah's hopeless ark drifted towards an unknown destination.
Kaiser Haq's Collected Poems 1968-2008 Published in the Streets of Dhaka is available in bookstores.