Masud Khan - RAIN-2

Its raining
Over distant lands
Over Brahma’s world,
Over Rangpur and Bogra’s vast expanse
In alluvial plains,
The rain veils Burma’s evening fields
And keeps streaming down.

And below these lightning flashes,
At the rain-formed night’s third quarter
Radiant races
Spring up at home or abroad
Like hyperactive frogs leaping
Into the unknown.

Provoked by thunder and lightning’s violent outbursts
Allured by their promises,
In the thick veil
And swirling stream,
In the darkness of the wet wind,
In the eastern expanse,
Underneath the sky
In vast and empty fields
Under the vast spread-out arum fields of the east.
Incredibly, unformed new nations emerge
Innumerable unsteady chaotic nations,
Restless, perturbed, incapable of standing up,
Lending themselves to grotesque maps,
Forming unstable, quivering, permeable boundaries
Governed by ill-defined laws and impotent ombudsmen
And armies marching past unimpressively,
They spring for no good reason
And seem destined to be doomed.

The night draws to a close. The rain too appears spent.
When day’s first light breaks out,
Those nations that would thrive and grow
And glow with innumerable rituals and fast-spreading religions
Feel their bodies disintegrating
And disappearing
Under the vast spread-out arum fields of the east.
------
Rangpur, Bogra: Names of two district-towns of northern part of Bangladesh.

Translated by Fakrul Alam, Writer, Translator. Professor of English, University of Dhaka.

Masud Khan

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