I had always been far away from you
When that far away enhanced with my global going, I smiled and said,
Now there will be “no eyes, no tears” as our Bangla proverb goes.
But
Who knew then that
Even when you have no eyes,
Eye-pots exists and poses a gulf
Who knew then that the more you go far away the more your eye-pots fill up
like the river Brisbane like the river Karnafuli
A holiday
a seclusion
a silence
a walk through the Jepson Street
make me homesick
Even a plane on far over my head
make me nostalgic
Faces white
voices toasty
dialects dubious
Create cravings for the lost and the left out
To escape
I take my unsmart phone and touch the celluloid buttons
I seek to hide in the far away familiar
to cabbage my days with the digital love
But calls to end
The digital to drop
the void to reopen
And feeling like a bare banana
I open my research data
A novel of migration
In the fold of Brisbane.
===x===
Umme Salma, originally written in 2016, July, after arriving in Australia
Salma Seclusion 