Poem 1:
Masks in the Sun
Ayman Ahad
Night splits open.
The smell of blood rises.
Buried history bursts from the ground.
Bullets bought with the people’s money
tear into the nation’s future.
The ruler’s hand is cold.
The wound is deep.
Bodies return.
Hundreds.
They float in the river’s current.
Broken dreams grin from their graves.
Children march.
Youth march.
The old march.
Voices roar like a storm:
“Tempest in my chest, shoot if you dare!”
The sky shakes.
Thunder cracks.
Bengal trembles.
Clouds burn with the heat of blood.
Rulers flee.
Masks fall from the faces of power.
A new sun rises.
Twilight refuses to leave.
The sky stays red.
The fight goes on.
Local plots twist with foreign shadows.
The crowd roars.
Then falls silent.
New rulers learn the old game.
Promises fade.
Greed stays.
Will morning come?
Will Bengal see golden days?
Will young blood spill once more?
Will red vanish from the map?
Will green answer the call?
Or will green be sold
worn as power’s newest disguise?
Poem 2:
Empty Letter
Ayman Ahad
Mistakes encircle me
they began long ago,
Yet from seconds into years
their journey has never ceased.
The first slip was in the alphabet,
then in the trembling of words,
and finally in the sentence
where my faltering voice confessed:
I love you.
In the dense darkness of night,
under September’s drizzling rain,
amid the stillness of midnight,
my scattered thoughts
could not take the shape of poetry,
yet they beckoned me
with the fragile hand of dreams.
And so I wonder
Is love measured by distance
as though the farther we drift,
the deeper we ache?
Is love only as long-lived
as the questions we dare to ask?
Barefoot on dew-soaked grass,
waiting by the pond with a fishing line
for unseen, elusive fish;
the soft clink of tea in porcelain cups,
feelings wrapped in morning fog,
the moon glimpsed at midnight
were these, too, mistakes?
Perhaps the expression of life itself
is destined, in the end,
to become colorless,
wordless,
and finally
sentence-less.
Poet:
Ayman Ahad
M.A. in English Literature
Khulna University
