Midnight, Dhaka
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About this ebook
Mir Mahfuz Ali is an exceptional new voice in British poetry; native of what is now Bangladesh, Mahfuz grew up during the difficult period of the early 1970s when the region was struck, first by a devastating cyclone, then by a particularly vicious civil war. As a boy, Mahfuz witnessed atrocities and writes about them with a searing directness in poems like “My Salma” and the title poem. But much more than this, his trauma becomes transformative, and his poetry the key to unlocking memories of a childhood that are rich in nuance, gorgeous in detail, and evocative of a beautiful country. They celebrate the human capacity for love, survival and renewal.
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Midnight, Dhaka - Mir Mahfuz Ali
Author
Midnight, Dhaka, 25 March 1971
I am a hardened camera clicking at midnight.
I have caught it all – the screeching tanks
pounding the city under the massy heat,
searchlights dicing the streets like bayonets.
Kalashnikovs mowing down rickshaw pullers,
vendor sellers, beggars on the pavements.
I click on, despite the dry and bitter dust
scratched on the lake-black water of my Nikon eye,
at a Bedford truck waiting by the roadside,
at two soldiers holding the dead by their hands and legs,
throwing them into the back, hurling
them one upon another until the floor
is loaded to the sky’s armpits. The corpses stare
at our star’s succulent whiteness
with their arms flung out as if to bridge a nation.
Their bodies shake when the lorry chugs.
I click as the soldiers laugh at the billboard on the bulkhead:
GUINNESS IS GOOD FOR YOU
SIX MILLION DRUNK EVERY DAY.
My Salma
Forgive me badho, my camellia bush,
when you are full of yourself and blooming,
you may ask why, having spent so many years
comfortably in your breasts, I still dream of Salma’s,
just as I did when I was a hungry boy in shorts,
her perfect fullness amongst chestnut leaves.
The long grass broke as I ran, leaving
its pollen on my bare legs.
When the soldiers came, even the wind
at my heels began to worship Salma’s beauty.
*
A soldier kicked me in the ribs. I fell
to the ground wailing.
They brought Salma into the yard,
asked me to watch how they would explode
a bullet into her. But I turned my head away
as they ripped her begooni blouse,
exposing her startled flesh. The young soldier
held my head, twisting it back towards her,
urging me to spit at a woman
as I might spit a melon seed into the olive dirt.
*
The soldier decorated with two silver bars
and two half-inch stripes was the first to drop his
ironed khaki trousers and dive on top of Salma.
His back arched as she fought for the last leaf
of her dignity. He laughed as he pumped
his rifle-blue buttocks in the Hemonti sun.
Then covered in Bengal’s soft soil, he offered
her to the next soldier in line.
They all had their share of