(Illustration by Suvajit Dey)
The World Takes a Breath
The world takes a breath
noisily —
recycling anodyne
text messages
about the wisdom
of looking within,
photographs of mute anguish
to give us our daily fix
of indignation,
a wild pandemic
of pieties.
Who’d have thought
an empty hour
was so much labour?
We walk the day most times
on steel girders
of habit
knowing that as long as there are lists
the world is safe,
and meaning won’t save us
(never has),
but rhythms will.
And only sometimes
does all the fumbling
and twitching
swivel
into
immaculate choreography
and the sky falls away
like blue laughter
and suddenly we’re cycling,
hands free, hands free,
on air.
Arundhathi Subramaniam is an award-winning author and poet
Spare Us
Daud Haider
ImprisonmentI know, like a familiar nightmare
by heart,
I have peeled months and sieved seasons in jails.
Here I am hunched again among scourges of loneliness
Bruised by a two-headed hydra — terror and an invisible
virus.
Despairing and dead,
Hungry and ailing,
Men in perpetual winter haunt pyres and graves across
centuries
as gigantic griefs every waking hour
Their phantom screams pound my listless ears.
Spare us, O goddess of dark nights, spare us your blood-
ied, frightening grimace.
Daud Haider is a Bangladeshi poet in exile in Berlin. The poem has been translated from Bengali by SwatiGhosh