Your face is a wonderYou said, Your brain is crafted from ice.
I said, Not impossible. At times that cold
makes me numb. Dumb, too.
But your heart is a live volcano.
You said. I said, Not impossible. At times
I feel it, that I have become ash. In a gentle breeze
I am flying far, in every direction.
You’re a bit much. You said. I said, Right.
All of me is a bit much. Like a pendulum,
from ice to fire and from fire to ice is my route.
I have never learned to stop anywhere else.
You said, I can feel that in your ice there exists some warmth
and some cold in your fire.
I stared at your face.
Your face is a wonder, on one side the sun, on the other the moon.
You’re not a poetIf midnight doesn’t scorch you
or midday—you’re not a poet.
If the handful of water, before it reaches your lips,
doesn’t slip through,
If you’re not pushed away again and again
by your beloved, your lover—
You’re not a poet.
If most people don’t scrutinize you like a private eye
glancing at your unconcerned liveliness
If society’s arrows don’t pierce you without cause,
If they don’t fear you in their hearts,
the tusked drunkard or the pillars of the palace,
You’re not a poet.
If dewdrops do not waver in your heart
If rain doesn’t turn away from you in heartache
If flowers do not pale
in your shadow
And if, in the blood red aura of sunset, you
cannot see sunrise,
You’re not a poet.
Khaled Hossain is an award-winning poet, fiction writer and essayist, also well-known for writing children’s poetry. He was recently awarded the Agrani Bank-Shishu Academy Children’s Literature Prize. Hossain is a professor of Bangla literature at Jahangirnagar University.Shabnam Nadiya is a writer and translator currently based in California. Her translation of Moinul Ahsan Saber’s novel The Mercenary was published by Bengal Lights Books (Dhaka) in 2016; the US edition by Seagull Books is forthcoming in 2018. Her work can be found at: www.shabnamnadiya.com.