The chili plant

This is a bizarre sequence, but it's exactly how it happened, dream and all. Last week, my uncle gave my father a potted bird's eye chili plant which he has since placed in my balcony.

My late grandfather named me Jasmin because in Islamic culture, the jasmine is the "flower of heaven." I guess the chili would then be an allusion to "fire," and my father's happiness at its growth an affirmation of his naiveté.

i dreamt of my namesake,
a cluster of jasmines crushed in my palm
the consignment of paradise my grandfather
had willed for me at birth
i awoke to east new york fog
breathing on my glass doors, beyond
which my father had placed a lone
chili plant on the concrete

he watered it often and marveled
at how quickly its buds came aflame

off track

in every borough you will find a place colorless
tonight on Roosevelt there are
old Chinese men dragging on Marlboro’s
when i walk by and they tell me to zip up my jacket
i wonder where their children are
and if they can still tell them to button their coats

inside, the Italian men are bent over counters
hunched together with furious faces, stubs in hand
there is no warmth awaiting them back home
they yell at the screens and at each other

night after night they stumble
into the dim lights and tables without chairs
in search of the elusive moment when all
will be right again but it never comes.

they have no identifying features of their own
so they share
gray winter coats, the smell of ash and
children that are ashamed of them.

Mukti Bahini (The Freedom Fighters)

Today marks 39 years since Bangladesh declared its independence. I wanted to post a poem I wrote about my little sister (the younger twin) and her curiosity about the Bangladeshi Language Movement and Liberation War in general. This past February 21st was the 58th anniversary of the Language movement, and she watched a historical program with my mother on this date as she sat on the floor creating her Japanese cartoons. Her questions and innocence (along with the irony of the fact that Bangla will probably be lost during her generation) inspired this.

Queens, New York City. February 21st, 2010.

A nine year old girl sits
on an oriental rug in the living room,
empty printer paper and anime
sketches scattered about the floor
with littered pens, black and blue.

Her name is Naurene:
"woman of honor; light."
In the dim evening, her mother watches television
where film-grain images, four decades old
are broadcast in black and white.

They are images of men-
Men in loincloths, with bayonets
Men shamed, naked, proud
Men Hindu, Men Musulman
Men lifeless, tangled, in rotting masses
Men in marches, men with signs
in a tongue Naurene cannot read
Men barely of age, as valiant as Men
at their graves
and the graves of their severed children
All gone too soon.

"Who are they?" she asks in Bangla,
shading a white
hollow; a reflection of light
in the eye of her Manga character.

They are the meek; the Shaheed*
of dreams they never saw, and they died for you.
They died for you, Naurene,
and they did not know your name.

*Arabic for 'martyr' (literally, 'witness')

Madrugada (Translated 2005)

This is the only poem I have translated (when my language skills were much better). I tried my best to preserve the Spanish, but took the liberty to add my own "style" to the translation. However, the meanings are just about the same.

For reference, Juana de Ibarbourou was a Uruguayan feminist poet- something you can probably pick up from the poem itself. Photo from Wikipedia.

MADRUGADA

He pasado la noche inquieta y desvelada.

Aclara el día y me escurro de la cama, aburrida.

Hoy yo sola paseo por esta calle extrema

de portones cerrados y de casas dormidas.

Amanecer como de humo.

Parece que el sol, malhumorado,

con leña verde peparara el fuego

para cocer su desayuno.

El viento es húmedo como recién salido

de un baño. En el cielo pálido,

las estrellas descoloridas

poco a poco se van borrando.

Pasa un lechero con boina roja.

Desde lo alto de un viejo muro,

me tienta un gajo curvo y felposo,

lleno de nísperos maduros.

Ando, ando, ando, ando.

Cuando retorne y hacia él me incline

con un beso, para despertarlo,

él pensará también, con gozo ávido,

que acabo de salir del baño.

-Juana de Ibarbourou

DAWN

I have passed the night, troubled and kept awake.

The day is clarifying and I slip out of bed, bored.

Today I alone pass through this far-carrying street

of small closed doors and of sleeping houses.

There is a dawn like smoke.

It seems that the ill-humored sun

has kindled a fire with green wood,

with which to cook its breakfast.

The wind is humid as if

it has recently returned from a bath.

In the pale sky, the colorless stars

are erased, little by little.

There passes a milkman in a red beret.

From the tallness of an old stone wall,

a curved, plush branch touches me

with the heaviness of its ripe medlars.

I walk and I walk,

and I walk, and I walk.

When I come back and incline towards him

with a kiss, meant to awaken him,

he too, will think with eager joy

that I have just returned from the bath.

-Jasmin Sultana, trans.

"Their Eyes Were Watching God" (2005)

In laymen's terms, a found poem is one that is formed by rearranging words, phrases, and lines from another piece of writing (such as a novel) to create an original poem. Technically, this poem is my own but I should state that I have used groups of words from Zora Neale Hurston's novel (of the same name). For more information, see here.

"Their Eyes Were Watching God"

If love is a bed-quilt

of things done and undone

of remorseless sweet

like the sanctum of a bloom

then is it the rose of the world

on a cracked plate?

For she had come back

from the sodden, the bloated

and he was asking questions, smoking a cigar,

saving his breath on talk.

They sat in judgement

of dragged out dramas,

skins powerful and human.

They sat in judgement.

Untitled Prose (2005)

In the beginning, there was nothing but a half-shadow, the silver thread of dreams leftover from the night before.

We looked at red sunlight through closed eyes, accepting our forgotten faith of tunnels and abandoned trainyards. It wasn't until the pavement ceased to belong to the Earth, that it seemed to me the sky was moving.

They interrupted Mozart

I realized I haven't written about today since October 2001, when I was sitting amongst fellow "re-located" Stuyvesant students in a classroom at Brooklyn Tech and was asked by my English teacher to do so. Today, I have nothing left of the memories of the "walk" other than the rare nightmare of a plane crash. So, eight years later, after Fajr, I tried to put myself back in the thoughts of my fourteen year old self, and this is what I wrote.

I guess you can read this for background.

They interrupted Mozart!

In second period music class,

two planes, just two buildings,

"Nothing to worry about-

send everyone to third period."

World history. The teacher

turns on our television, there is

an ominous hole.

"They can fix that, right?"

I whisper to a student.

The darkness grows outside the window

with my questions:

(How will I go back to Queens?

Is my father out there, in his cab?)

and is interrupted by flickering lights

and our screams as a shockwave

comes through from the second tower's fall.

But we sit, in world history

and watch the World fly around us,

in black garbage bags

and white

and every gradient

of steel,

and when the colossals have

collapsed, in their entirety

the chancellor says we can leave.

We're taken outside, where

the class separates within minutes,

walking backwards as we stare at the smoke.

I'm angry at my poor choice of sandals.

I'm angry because even after ten years

as a New Yorker I still

craned my neck staring up at the towers

every time I passed.

They were that grand and that

beautiful, and now they had been taken

from me and my city.

It's my first week of high school,

do I even have any good friends yet?

I look for friendly strangers.

"I just want to call my parents,

I only knew how to get home

from the World Trade Center Stop."

They give me

quarters, but my father's cell phone,

anyone's cell phone,

is not working.

So I walk to Penn Station with a family

that buys me lo mein and Snapple

Orangeade for lunch. "We'll get you to

the E. We are going to Queens, too."

But the E train they put me on was not

the one I remembered.

Ode to the Bronx

Bronx,

how can I leave you?

home when I had no home,

your streets I wandered,

wistful and lone.

Bronx,

are you any less beautiful,

in your decay?

brick tenements rise, crumbling from the smoke

they form your cityscape on train windows.

Bronx,

have you not inspired

the city's downtrodden?

birthplace of hip hop,

the language of the worn and resolute.

Bronx,

who will love

your ignored children?

the graffiti sets your schools ablaze

the apartment hallways are silent with grief.

Bronx,

how can I leave you

burning still, after three decades?

home when I had no home,

your streets I wandered,

wistful and lone.

***

This one is very close to my heart. If I had the presence I would make an attempt at def poetry with this but sadly I don't. I've gotten embarrassed and flustered at every poem I ever read aloud.

I wrote it after I realized how many others like me, have had small beginnings in this borough, or ended up in the Bronx at some point or another in their lives- only to leave when they had the means to. I know at some point my family wants to go back to Queens, and inshAllah will be able to. But I can't help but feel an immense sadness for all the other children, just like my little sisters, that will be left behind in our far from perfect public schools and housing developments.

heritage (2005)

I don't even know what I was trying to do with the enjambment here. This is from senior year of high school. Eventually I used imagery from this poem to write a story (The Sacrifice) so some of it might sound familiar.

A thousand ways into Bengal, but not one way out.
-Bangladeshi/British proverb

the aroma of banana leaves on
wet roads a lone rickshaw braves
the breeze prickling humidity against
my skin awaits the gray monsoon
beneath clouds that break into aquamarine
palm trees hear the muezzin’s call to prayer
mats of jute and straw and wind
sprays hummingbirds in the lily
pads course through on gondolas
carry jackfruit into the harbors feel
the simple strength of life in sky
breathes love into the river-air.

Ode to my Brother

This is one that's not quite finished. It just has some ideas mostly, but if you want to evaluate it as poetry it is really not a good one- so please don't haha. Just wanted to write something bare-bones about my brother, and honestly, when it comes to him, the last thing I want to be is poetic! That would be SO corny.

My brother was born
in Chittagong, in 1989.

My brother plays football in the snow
in a fenced school basketball court
where the day laborers
play futbol in the summer.

My brother runs with Ammar the Pakistani
and Tony the Dominican on the Square.

My brother has an unlimited Metrocard
and takes the six train home to Westchester Avenue.

My brother is home later
than I can ever be.

My brother hates me because my parents love me.

My brother doesn't ask for my opinion
and never laughs at my jokes.

My brother's name means unyielding.

My brother eats chicken and rice on Fridays
from the halal stand in the city
and doesn't tell my mother.

My brother makes me do push-ups
because I can't do push-ups.

My brother makes me laugh
and tells it like it is.

My brother loves me
but will never admit it.

Realization Upon Waking

I suppose this is a pairing for this older poem. It's not really my style as it has slant rhyme and I tend to avoid any sort of rhyme, but it just seemed to work with it.

Did it not love you, when it was forgotten
weight on your bookshelf,
a cornered page of a tome?
Because that which is written is just and right
and has no will of its own.

The pages bore witness
to the muscle's lazy beating,
the rift underneath the flesh;
they stifled its breath with their parchment hands
and silenced it in death.

Boston Intercollegiate Poetry Festival (April 2008)

"Emancipation from the bondage of the soil is no freedom for the tree."
-Rabindranath Tagore

When he was fourteen,
lying shirtless
underneath palm fronds
at the height of the Liberation,
did he imagine, cities
larger than Dhaka?
He said,
"One day, I will be saluted
by men of Britain, and the people of Africa
but for now my feet are bare."

Traveler, protector
born of incessant rains in the foundry
of Bengal to arms
that abandoned him
at Lexington and 51st
on an island that is dense,
sullen and lone
13.4 miles of steel boundaries
held fast in his heart

Below, the grit of subway tracks lives
in slivers of moonlight crackling
through the grates
I am indebted not
to a father but to the world
for he has given himself
in language and breath
and blood to the earth
so much that he and the soil
have become joined.

One day, I will be your protector,
a presence as light as a whisper
in the grooves of aged trees,
and carry you with the pride
your words have brought forth across
three continents

but for now my feet are bare.

It is difficult to resist the onset of love (August 3rd, 2007)

"I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times, in life after life, in age after age forever."

-Rabindranath Tagore

It is difficult to resist the onset of love

the sinews of which strangle the taut flesh
of a pulsing heart until it drops
heavy in the chest, with its last futile thuds
rampant beneath the skin
as they are muffled and skipped into the throat
to become that telltale lump
(with all the smoothness of a flat stone
that cuts across water
before it is lost to the depths.)
And so I am lost to you.

the scene you will always remember (April 2007)

a half hour to sunset
the wet leaves from the morning trickled
into the kitchen window, washed in gold
and cast upon your dismal face
she is glorified, she is a woman
her days are stripped pale and there is sadness
in the ebb of her frame, the bend of her legs
she says, it's you she worries for
(and it is hard not to notice
the shape of her mouth)
you know all the ways her body folds
the hair that wanders from the neck
the way her back
arches into her clothes and the sheets, they too
freeze to her magnolia skin
she avoids your eyes, they are marbled
raw, reptilian, but her own
are colorless and feign indifference
she has always laughed
too often and too much
but in the last flickers of the day
you realize your favorite bit of her
is behind the knees
the slivers of flesh hidden from light
because they
like you
face inwards from the world

Beware the Ides of March (April 2007)

I thought myself to be invincible
even when those eyes burnt
into some depth of me and gripped my heart
with the benevolence of a poison
and her parched hands clasped mine
with the desperation of a woman
often forgotten.

On nights like this I have seen the ends
of cities, gods, and ages:
rogues estranged from the seas to bleed
against skies and crosses
and men, vainglorious fall to swells
of sand and vicious waters.

Tragic,

but there is no honor in dying
by the sword of a man you loved.

Across the Atlantic (March 2007)

I took a shot at a sestina for a class!

Walking alley after alley, I rest each bone and limb
upon smooth countertops, sheltered from shaken skies.
I am half inclined to give in, but I sit waiting
unable to believe I am an ocean away.
Breathing this infusion of warm java air,
I write the stories of my lover

which is a peculiar thing, because a story of a lover
is forgotten as fast as a stray leaf forgets the limb
from which it sprung. In cold air,
the heavens lend watercolors to their skies
dabs of asphalt that are swept away
by the roving wind, forever waiting.

In this town it seems as if everyone is waiting.
For news of an old acquaintance, a lost lover
an estranged relative, a friend gone away
for whom they would give any limb
to find and hold again beneath these skies.
There is loss, a song of sadness in the air.

And life itself, is but the intake of air
abruptly, or in fluidity, always waiting
for fate to reveal what’s held for us in the skies.
A bleak future, a child, a lover
loss of life or pride or loss of limb
until the drifts of time take all away.

My pen scratches paper and scribes away
pulling words of life and strength out of air,
speaking as if it were in fact, a limb
of my own. It knows nothing of waiting
pallid nights for the return of a lover
but it writes truthfully, of sin and sunken skies.

I know what is to be because I have seen it in the skies.
I will crumple these words, I will wander away,
I will never find this pretentious lover,
the lurid scent that wafts in the air
with last night’s dream. The clock is not waiting.
My heart aches through my every limb.

So I face the skies, into the English winter air,
press on through streets, away where life is waiting
for me to see with the eyes of a lover, and heal an unfamiliar limb.

Sanford, Maine. 5:43AM (February 2007)

he saw her for the last time off route 109
her hair brassy
under the fluid lights of the parking lot

they shared a cigarette, and a cause
as empty as the feeling
in the pits of their stomachs
an infatuation
that caved them like the suburb walls
a town plagued by the diligence of traffic police

she said she owed him nothing
life goes on in this place,
whether I have you or not

in the creeping light of New England dawn
a Chevrolet rounds the bend
the high school janitor has arrived for his shift
across the four lane street,
his uniform embroidered Earl
and a girl of sixteen, clean pressed in navy
sweeps cold floors at the diner
with buzzing neon lights

the burning half of his smoke
meets a crushed end
in the pavement before his departure
he thinks of her in secret;
he loves her in theory

in the mornings his eyes are glass gray
with the slightest bit of sky

Red (February 2007)

Seventeen, in brilliant blood silk
that clung unwillingly to her pale skin
in the damp heat of the East
when I wear rouge it is always 1983
rose water permeating the air of Dhaka streets
and mother, feet deep in scarlet dye
leaves wet footprints from a car
to an unfamiliar place and life
She is a simple, privileged woman
in love with her children and the man
that fate had chosen for her
she often reckons life is over past thirty
I remember her at the dressing table
stark pink on her olive cheeks
and the trained dabs of talc and Dior
the only pleasures in which she's obliged
When I dress up I am too much like her---
blue pearls against the flash of my veins
that belong to countries I don't remember
I was blessed with a good marriage
She told us, and it was true
in the same way that I am also unlucky
with a mother, I will never truly know

Self (2005)

tracing faint New Britain snow with my nine year old nose
pressed against Cadillac windows that brought me back
to the soul of Chinatown, immigrant vendors,
Tribeca the terrific, the godly towers.

from the workers' E in the sleeping borough
to the lonely 6 that left me feeling old at 17-
during clandestine meetings in Grand Central,
and lost as I worked-

Soho fitting rooms stuffy with Chance by Chanel
and far too beautiful women i hoped to be like someday.

The Last Hours of Sirius Black

My favorite HP character, course I had to write something about him.
This one's dated November 11, 2003.

I stare at the gray faded ceiling
In this ancient house,
too old for words
The stagnant air hangs low and heavy
Through the leaded windows I used to close

I let the dawn creep in today
To submerge my thoughts with sun and dust
But I have found not even light
Can rest my soul,
when death comes first