Rabindranath

You’re a traffic island in our consciousness,
O Rabindranath!
You stand
as if a golden, powerless policeman,
always lighting your red, yellow, green signals.
To get to a
small unknown station named Bangladesh,
should I buy
my ticket from you,
selling all my bits and pieces?
In your own land, dear poet, a few of us,
like tourists,
are still drifting
around drugstores.
With a stethoscope, you silently walked away
some time ago,
but among the gloomy untreatable patients
sitting on stools and benches in the corridor, 
I was also waiting for you.
O visionary doctor, didn’t you receive
my postcard
from our post office?
I wrote a bunch of letters
in pellucid words,
describing all the ailments with care.
You turned a blind eye, yet since perceptions
were auspicious,
I assumed you’re an almirah
of colorful sleeping tablets.
I returned home fearlessly
at the alarming and panic-stricken night,
silently went to bed and fell on the back
without changing dresses,
witnessed luminous stars the entire night,
as if medicine bottles,
falling in drops
on the deaf footpath 
sans lips and palates and tongues.
We know you’re neither a doctor
nor a salesman in a drugstore!
At the beginning of the day,
you’re in the depth of our heart,
a breakfast served on a table after a sleepless night;
you’re deep within our intellect and bones, veins and hearts
ambuscading like
a hunting cat,
taking away all our golden and silvery fish.
Like Robin Hood, you looted
our embarrassed emporiums and blasted banks
and then distributed all the money
among the penniless and the wretched.
Breaking away from the procession,
I’ve been fluttering a glittering note of taka,
as if playing a guitar,
with my deft fingers,
and— 
in the park at night, you’re my last restaurant
disseminating light.

Translated by Mohammad Shafiqul Islam.

Mohammad Shafiqul Islam, author of On the Other Side of Silence, is a poet, translator, and academic, currently teaching as Professor in the Department of English, Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, Sylhet. Email: msislam-eng@sust.edu.