Six Shared Seasons

Since we are
our worst enemies,
is it any surprise
that barbed wire,
watchtower and searchlight
should keep neighbours apart,
border guards suddenly
slug it out
for no apparent reason,

families picnic
willy-nilly, as they wait
in visa queues,
loonies looking just
like you and me
blow up each other's shrines,
and poor people are
rounded up—undesirables
or aliens or both
we're almost as bad
as Europe was
until the other day.
All the time
the year keeps rolling
to its celestial schedule:
grishma's furnace heat,
barsha, monsoon floods,
sarat's mellow skies,
hemant's fresh harvest,
mist over the fields,
dew underfoot,
warmth of embroidered quilts,
winter bonfires, snow on mountains,
fog on the plains,
then every girl a beauty
in vasant's vibrant amber,
& flowers with humid lips
kissing the passionate bee.
Six seasons to everyone else's
Four — from the Himalayas
to Serendip, & the Indus plains
to the delta
of the Ganges & Brahmaputra —
hold the whole
of Southasia together,
six shared seasons
making nought
of borders & barbed wire.
Nature as usual, is
prodigal with gifts & lessons —
& we as usual, alas,
grab the gifts & ignore the rest.

Kaiser Haq's Published in the Streets of Dhaka: Collected Poems (1966-2006) is available in the city's bookstores.