Happy Reading!

After Twenty years

Jibanananda Das

If twenty years from now I should meet her again,

Again, twenty years hence—

Perhaps beside a clump of paddy stalks

In late October—

As the evening crows head home—as the tawny river

Softens in amongst reeds and grasses—through fields.

Or, perhaps there is no longer paddy standing in fields.

No more hustle, no more hurry.

Chaff is blowing, strewn about from duck nests

From nests of birds,

Night, cold, moisture from dew collecting in the homes of muniya birds.

Twenty, twenty long years from now when our lives will have been spent—

If then most unexpectedly upon a path through the field we again should meet.

It might be that the moon has come at midnight, hovering behind a spray of leaves,

Thin dark branches of the shirish or the jam,

The jhau—the mango,

Veiling her lunar face.

After twenty years, and I've forgotten you.

Our lives will have passed full twenty years—

And then, once more, if we should see each other.

Then, perhaps, an owl alights and toddles upon the field—

And then, through the alleys shaped by babla branches,

Through the windows formed by the ashvattha,

She flies, hides herself away.

Elsewhere, quiet as eyelids closing, hawk wings fold—

That hawk, a golden gold—stalked by the dew—

If suddenly, twenty years from now, I should find in that misty haze you!

[Translated from the Bangla by Clinton B. Seely ]

["After Twenty Years," published in Kavita, December, 1935; included in the original Banalata Sen. The muniya is a small bird with red wings and beak; the shirish, jam, jhau, babla, and ashvattha are all trees.]

Poetry Such As

Al Mahmud

Poetry is nothing but the memory of adolescence;

The melancholic face of my mother often remembered by me;

Poetry, the yellow bird sitting alone on a bough of Nim tree;

Poetry, my younger brothers and sisters, sitting sleeplessly

surrounding the fire of leaves; and the return of our father,

ringing bell of his bicycle and his call 'Rabeya! Rabeya! '

Poetry is the southern door kept ajar which got unlocked

by the name of my mother.

Poetry is nothing but going back crossing the foggy way

across the knee-water river. Poetry, the Azan of dawn

or the burning of stubble; it's the expanded smell of sesame

on the belly of cake, the acute smell of fish,

the net spread on the yard and the grassy grave of

my grandfather

in the cluster of bamboo.

Poetry, an unhappy teenager growing up in the

forty six;

Poetry, the meeting, freedom, procession and the

flag of a truant school boy,

and the plaintive description of the elder coming

back losing all in the flame of tumult.

Poetry, the birds of pastureland, the collected eggs of

ducks and the fragrant grass;

Poetry, the lost calf belonging to the sad faced wife that

fled away snapping the rope;

Poetry, the decorated letters in a secret pad within

a blue envelope; Poetry means Ayesha Akter, the girl of unfolded

hair at a village Maktab.

[Translated from the Bangla by Sayeed Abubakar ]