A Poem of Kashbon
The sky is the Kashbon, beside the river
Children of Heaven play in the Kashbon
I looked at the garden of white cloud sitting beside the quay
Before feeling which was the sky and which was River
My eyes filled with cold-stricken white snow and ice
You have done good for not dyeing my hair
I know, the sky is but the nursery rhymes of the childhood days
But the clouds are white Kash flower of the sky.
I will be the bells of your ankle, cloud
I will be sleep in your eyes, Shall be a drop of tears
I’ll be the girls’ school covering the whole sky
Today so much Shefali flowers bloom, I’ll send you all
Take those in both of your hands, let me decorate those
with black alphabets.
Six alphabets on the map
I took up the alphabets and saw six of its letters
Have turned into the name of Bangalee.
They turned into the sodden sky of Bangla
Have turned into thirteen hundred rivers
I have engraved these letters and moved to many-a-places
Countries all around, in the conferences and meetings, at the gate of United Nations
Everywhere I told Here I am a Bangalee
My identity is Skeikh Mujibur These six words.
I do not have any other characteristics
I saw everywhere immediately all the doors get open a jar
On the walls of United Nations the echo of
the first speech in Bangla echoed
The earliest song of Charyapad
I then start to feel may be today is
Spring Festival
Today is the gallant procession of Pahela Boishakh,
The heroic poems of Liberation War
And covering the entire atlas, there is six letters, like new morning.
I couldn’t remember all those things
A few people want to know to which woman of the world
I loved first.
A few people want to know to whom I write my first letter
Some ask, Which name did I wrote down first furtively
What did amazed me first, whose hand did I touched first
I could not tell anything about all these questions
of my first memories
I gazed on like an idiot.
Who ever recollect memories of first tears,
then there were so many rains
The word I wrote on the earthen slate first
Could not be told to anybody at any cost
When did I first embraced that white swan on my bosom
That feeling has mixed with the wind
The name I engraved first on the stairs of the lake
After so many years those writings were all wiped away with tears
How could I show that initial alphabet?
How could I express the feeling of my first weep after
I dreamt my first dream?
I’ve covered my face a million times when I first uttered
the word ‘I love you’.
When I first saw the rain on Earth
When I first heard the bird chirp, When I first saw the evening star.
No, no I couldn’t remember all those things
Nobody could remember those
Who have first given me a rose secretly
Have concealed a timid letter in my book
Who has first spoken to my ears a few words
intoxicating, like a cuckoo
All of those I couldn’t remember at all.
[1] Mahadev Saha (b. 1944), first book of poems ‘Ei Griho ei Sannyas‘ was published in 1972