Category: An Emotional Bedouin

My father lives in’ Merica
And I am in the remote bushes
My married father and his wife
And my brothers with spike hair
And sisters with ponytail
In the twenty second-floor
Seeping their souls into the lovely misty cloud.

With dry eyes
I live here in the wild foliages
‘Very soon, very soon … all processing on …
She’ll leave ….’
With watery eyes, dadu gossips to all.
Young men loiter around the house
And wink at my shadow, a golden chariot to cross
The fuming white Atlantic.

My responsible beloved father lives a life
There
Leaving my mother inside the silent earth
Calls and sends dollar
With assurance, ‘Very soon … very soon.’
Years after years. 

Umme Salma published in Transnational Literature

If you bid an early adieu
A black cloud covers the sunny view
A white snow freezes the mobile carp
Sorrow gathers on the eyes’ plateau.

If you become my saree’s colour
I can let loose the wild anchal
If you become my home’s dear
I can fade away in your core

Please don’t go
Whirling a wild sorrow

I pray hard
for love for you
Every day of every year
I put holy rites on my palms
Keep begging for permanence
in Maghrib prayer

The sun goes down—the last day of the year
The black night signals the next, the new
I keep moaning, ‘Don’t go, don’t go…’
Hold me, cold me in your dusky hue.

Umme Salma, 2016, Toowong

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