Life, Dreams and Reality -- Sohel's Blog

About My Poems By Donald Justice How fashionably sad my early poems are! On their clipped lawns and hedges the snows fall; Rains beat against the tarpaulins of their porches, Where, Sunday mornings, the bored children sprawl, Reading the comics, before the parents rise. ---The rhymes, the meters, how they paralyze! Who walks out through their streets tonight? No one. You know these small towns, how all traffic stops At ten; the corner streetlamps gathering moths; And the pale mannequins waiting in dark shops, Undressed, and ready for the dreams of men. --- Now the long silence. Now the beginning again. ------ The Voice of Col. Von Stauffenberg Rising From Purgatory By Donald Justice "Something fearful has happened ..... The Fuhrer is alive!" Fen. Fellgiebel, July 20, 1944 That last night we passed quietly, my brother and I. We sat talking of poems into the small hours; And saw, at dawn, for the last time, through

Funeral By Mahbubul Karim (Sohel) August 28, 2004 On their way out they shook my hand grabbing fingers, clammy and old, but strong like a cold hammer I could only stammer a few words of gratitude for their presence here tonight at my father's funeral in a night enveloped by briny past and rigid fortitude I stood in that long lonely corridor while the visitors gathered and waited in a room of prayer old and young with grief and fear My hands now rested on a thick wooden box where my father lied in sleep, peaceful, wrapped in clothe of pure white after a warm morning shower, sacred washed his remnant of tremor now peace had arrived daisy cutting morphine hopeless! now peace had arrived in absentia, at last I swallowed soured spits, forgotten pain, and angst in one gulp before others came forward, aghast concealed in condoled smile for another round of pleasantries, shaking of hands with attitude!

As If By Mahbubul Karim (Sohel) August 28, 2004 As if it had never happened As if it had never existed As if it was a prank, stunt or a second-rated fiction found in dusty paperback in a dilapidated bookstore abandoned by nose-high academics As if you and I were slanted As if you and I was confounded As if you and I were blunt from witnessing tumbling friction between stingy cat and rat playing hide and seek for a galore of popcorn bound crowd and polemics Histrionically speaking --- What if it did happen What if it did exist What if it was the Truth not a melodramatic romance novel smudged with tears of cheated, cheating wives? Now comes the hardest part It must be told as it unfolds in a world of reality under sun or light of moon "Truth shall set you free" swoon a worn out line, dying cliché Truth shall set you free in dungeon or iron bar tucked aside from afar, scrutiny in crocodile guarded la

Deep Inside an Ocean By Mahbubul Karim (Sohel) August 27, 2004 Deep inside an ocean I have seen red and blue swimming in unperturbed devotion that man reserves for religion's stake For the tiny red and blue the world above seems a mystery, written in a tongue understood by red and blue not in any particular oblong dimension, but the knowledge is there that the world above glares, devoid of water, lifeblood of red and blue that the world above is kinda, sorta out of their world, alien. Only the rumbling of boats starts havoc in form of waves or weed like net enslaves red and blue murmur of protests I've heard deep inside an ocean, imperceptible, beyond decibel range Deep inside an ocean sharks roam like defiant imperialists they follow the smell of blood or memory, past savoring taste of red and blue unprotected, neglected deep inside an ocean plagiarized songs of humans so adept in singing in voice of sweet melody Deep inside an

Letter in July By Elizabeth Spires My life slows and deepens. I am thirty-eight, neither here nor there. It is a morning in July, hot and clear. Out in the field, a bird repeats its quaternary call, four notes insisting, I'm here, I'm here. The field is unmowed, summer's wreckage everywhere. Even this early, all is expectancy. It is as if I float on a still pond, drowsing in the bottom of a rowboat, curled like a leaf into myself. The water laps at its old wooden sides as the sun beats down on my body, a wand, an enchantment, shaping it into something languid and new. A year ago, two, I dreamed I held a mirror to your unborn face and saw you, in the warped watery glass, not as a child but as you will be twenty years from now. I woke, a light breeze lifting the curtain, as if touched by a ghost's thin hand, light filling the room, coming from nowhere. I know the time, the place of our meeting. It will be January, the coldest night of

A Night Like This By Mahbubul Karim (Sohel) August 26, 2004 A night like this brings ice and fire of bitter and a trapped mountain standing in stones, glittered like precious diamonds and proud fountain A mountain with nimbus from thousands of years of burning and freezing in a cycle of time, torturous and pitiless erosions sweeping away cobbles and boulders in miniaturized shrine Can a mountain be sinusoidal, rhymes like a string, flowing in seismic waves through crusty tectonic plates wiggling away bones, dead leaves and zillions of species piercing other universes or dimensions invisible, undiscovered by "civilized" or "braves"? A night like this brings ice and fire of throttling "spirits" enmeshed in silent twister round and round that goes and goes by bitten monk, rabbi, priest, imam and prankster delivering customized sermons deciphering complex hegemons forgettable but potent for destruction of mortals and the

True Love By Robert Penn Warren In silence the heart raves. It utters words Meaningless, that never had A meaning. I was ten, skinny, red-headed, Freckled. In a big black Buick, Driven by a big grown boy, with a necktie, she sat In front of the drugstore, sipping something Through a straw. There is nothing like Beauty. It stops your heart. It Thickens your blood. It stops your breath. It Makes you feel dirty. You need a hot bath. I leaned against a telephone pole, and watched. I thought I would die if she saw me. How could I exist in the same world with that brightness? Two years later she smiled at me. She Named my name. I thought I would wake up dead. Her grown brothers walked with the bent-knee Swagger of horsemen. They were slick-faced. Told jokes in the barbershop. Did no work. Their father was what is called a drunkard. Whatever he was he stayed on the third floor Of the big white farmhouse under the maples for twenty-five years. He neve