[I wrote this poem on August 21, 2022, on the 18th anniversary of the terrible grenade attack on August 21, 2004. Again come the day of that terrible memory: Mohibul Aziz]
The Leader Courage Stood in the Chasm of Death
Mohibul Aziz
It’s explosion and explosion all around and all the way through,
The moment it was the voices of the people
The next the chorus of the metals.
Boomed out of the blue the sound of the battlefield,
It was like 1971-shelling hovered through the city sky—
The rain of the sudden outburst pierced through
The sharp sensitive eagle eyes of the protectors bodyguards and the gunmen.
Whizzing and hissing mingled with the shrilling and the bellowing,
The savage searching of the annihilators went on
Picking the targeted persons one after another.
Bodies dropped like cut stems of the trees with gushing blood,
Metallic shafts wriggled into the soft flesh.
Bullets cracked on and the snapping from the upper range,
Striding of the footsteps heard following the rushing pulling
Of the strings of the chocolate bombs.
Pistols made metallic laughter as those released hungry bullets,
Murderers’ iron-clasps lunched fiercely grenades
Thrown in the big wars.
Who would save who in that total deadly disarray?
The man still alive lost his two legs,
The man with his whole body intact lost his life.
Some tried to take a breath anew
While some left their last with the ultimate hope
Amid monoxide smokes.
They kept on moaning groaning,
Their faces grimaced in untranslatable signs.
Afternoon sky lost its translucence instantly
And turned to a midnight ambience.
The killers thought she’d gone
Gone disappearing from the earth like her beloved father
Whom she lost in the same month.
The leader courage stood then,
The dimming eyes in front of her held no sign of gazing
Only stillness,
Eerie bellowing of the mob reenacted the familiar scenes
Of the aftermath of the daily happenings in the liberation war.
They laid down yet being ever fresh and bright flowers plucked only just,
Their bloodshot eyes and bloodstained faces were ablaze
In silent protests.
For a moment she could see nothing, blindness took her over,
Could hear nothing, deafness grasped her.
She could even feel nothing at all except for one thing:
August is the cruelest month of the year!
21-08-2022