poems

Escapril: How a poetry writing challenge curates community

The Instagram account for Escapril posts all 30 prompts for the month ahead of time, and the poet is only required to write by taking inspiration from said prompts

Poetry, my useless weapon

As bird flocks take wing at the rattle of Sten guns

A fugitive

It was noontime when I arrived home the sun was shining bright

POETRY / Dhaka (2007-)

I was nine years of age the first time I set eyes on a Dhaka street. I received my first welcome from a group of beggars tapping on my car window.

POETRY / Placing Places

Someday, I will write about those places, the cities, monuments, and faces.

POETRY / Love won’t you love me

Break me into numbers and spirals, and blood and flesh make me all that I don't wish to be.

Defining Haiku poetry with poet Quamrul Hassan

Haiku is a poem in three lines that captures the image of a single moment in the reader’s mind.

POETRY / Maa

Delicate like butterfly wings, And yet as strong as boulders Her mind is a divine place, Eternal peace on her shoulders. 

POETRY / Favourite season

Showers and storms give way To a surge of sunlight A fragrance of hope floats in On morning breeze

October 13, 2022
October 13, 2022

Ahaduzzaman Mohammad Ali's 'Nakhshatra Nivey Jai': Poems well worth waiting for

A series of poems also reflect his ecological sensitivity to the machine in the garden and snakes and hyenas imperiling forests and rivers and Dhaka—the city he has lived in for most of his life.

September 2, 2022
September 2, 2022

Why ‘Hawa’ reminded me of Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’

The song “Shada Shada Kala Kala” seems almost like a visual rendition of “the merry minstrelsy” that breaks out in front of the bride as red as a rose.

July 7, 2022
July 7, 2022

Melancholy

The winter has seized my heart, I can only hear the silence around me now!

February 17, 2016
February 17, 2016

Love, rage, silence: Secret lives of Afghan female poets

With her kohl-rimmed eyes cast down, Nadia lilts through a folk couplet before a secret assembly of women poets on a forbidden subject that often gets people killed in Afghanistan -- love.

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