poems
POETRY / There’s no way you’ll outrun a bear
Smoother violence fills our hearts like charming splinters. The irony is I am the first of my women
POETRY / Be a tree
Be a tree Get wet in sorrow’s shower and you’ll recover. From envy’s scorching sun gather strength
POETRY / No door
His five sons/ Were killed and the books...
ESSAY / On wars and words
These words are not just some veils adorning the valour and victory of our freedom fighters; they're not just tributes but testaments to the rare occasion of the oppressed overpowering the oppressor.
ESSAY / Music and the space it creates for literature
I cannot, for the life of me, definitively describe what makes music. Growing up in a family where music of any form was not typically paid any reverence, my exposure to it was tunnelled into mainstream pop songs for the longest time.
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.
Placing Places
Someday, I will write about those places, the cities, monuments, and faces.
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.
Favourite season
Showers and storms give way To a surge of sunlight A fragrance of hope floats in On morning breeze
Maa
Delicate like butterfly wings, And yet as strong as boulders Her mind is a divine place, Eternal peace on her shoulders.
Decaying youth
Seek if you must If you believe the truth shall set you free And then? We heal.
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.
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.
Melancholy
The winter has seized my heart, I can only hear the silence around me now!
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.
