SHAHID QADRI

You’re a traffic island in our consciousness,

O Rabindranath!

You stand

as if a golden, powerless policeman,

always lighting your red, yellow, green signals.

To get to a

small unknown station named Bangladesh,

should I buy

my ticket from you,

selling all my bits and pieces?

In your own land, dear poet, a few of us,

like tourists,

are still drifting

around drugstores.

With a stethoscope, you silently walked away

some time ago,

but among the gloomy untreatable patients

sitting on stools and benches in the corridor,

I was also waiting for you.

O visionary doctor, didn’t you receive

my postcard

from our post office?

I wrote a bunch of letters

in pellucid words,

describing all the ailments with care.

You turned a blind eye, yet since perceptions

were auspicious,

I assumed you’re an almirah

of colorful sleeping tablets.

I returned home fearlessly

at the alarming and panic-stricken night,

silently went to bed and fell on the back

without changing dresses,

witnessed luminous stars the entire night,

as if medicine bottles,

falling in drops

on the deaf footpath

sans lips and palates and tongues.

We know you’re neither a doctor

nor a salesman in a drugstore!

At the beginning of the day,

you’re in the depth of our heart,

a breakfast served on a table after a sleepless night;

you’re deep within our intellect and bones, veins and hearts

ambuscading like

a hunting cat,

taking away all our golden and silvery fish.

Like Robin Hood, you looted

our embarrassed emporiums and blasted banks

and then distributed all the money

among the penniless and the wretched.

Breaking away from the procession,

I’ve been fluttering a glittering note of taka,

as if playing a guitar,

with my deft fingers,

and—

in the park at night, you’re my last restaurant

disseminating light.

Translated by Mohammad Shafiqul Islam.

Mohammad Shafiqul Islam , author of On the Other Side of Silence , is a poet, translator, and academic, currently teaching as Professor in the Department of English, Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, Sylhet. Email: msislam-eng@sust.edu.