Bangladesh
Kaifi Azmi
I am not a country you can set ablaze,
I am not a wall you can raze to the ground
nor a frontier you can obliterate.
This obsolete map of the world
spead before you on the table
is only a maze of wayward lines.
How can you find me here?
I am the passion of the obsessed,
the deathless dream of the oppressed.
When man bleeds his fellowman,
when exploitation crosses all-limits
and tyranny breaks all bounds,
suddenly appear in some corner,
I suddenly appear in some corner,
I arise from within some heart.
You must have seen me before:
sometimes in the east, somtimes in the west,
in cities, in the villages,
where there are people or in the wilderness-
I have only a past and no geography.
My history is forbidden to be taught,
people read in clandestine:
I am both the victor and the vanquished,
I execute my own murderers
and sometimes I am myself crucified.
The only difference is
my murderers die
but I do not, I cannot die.
How senseless you are!
The tanks you have received as alms
you roll them onto my heart,
all day and night you rain napalm on me.
Listen, you will tire one day.
How will you shackle my hands?
My hands are one forty million,
Which head will you axe?
I have seventy million heads on my shoulders.
(Translated from Urdu – anonymous)
Kaifi Azmi, Indian Urdu poet
Song of Bangladesh
Joan Baez
Bangladesh, Bangladesh
Bangladesh, Bangladesh
When the sun sinks in the west
Die a million people of the Bangladesh
The story of Bangladesh
Is an ancient one again made fresh
By blind men who carry out commands
Which flow out of the laws upon which nation stands
Which is to sacrifice a people for a land
Bangladesh, Bangladesh
Bangladesh, Bangladesh
When the sun sinks in the west
Die a million people of the Bangladesh
Once again we stand aside
And watch the families crucified
See a teenage mother’s vacant eyes
As she watches her feeble baby try
To fight the monsoon rains and the cholera flies
And the students at the university
Asleep at night quite peacefully
The soldiers came and shot them in their beds
And terror took the dorm awakening shrieks of dread
And silent frozen forms and pillows drenched in red
Bangladesh, Bangladesh
Bangladesh, Bangladesh
When the sun sinks in the west
Die a million people of the Bangladesh
Did you read about the army officer’s plea
For donor’s blood? It was given willingly
By boys who took the needles in their veins
And from their bodies every drop of blood was drained
No time to comprehend and there was little pain
And so the story of Bangladesh
Is an ancient one again made fresh
By all who carry out commands
Which flow out of the laws upon which nations stand
Which say to sacrifice a people for a land
Bangladesh, Bangladesh
Bangladesh, Bangladesh
When the sun sinks in the west
Die a million people of the Bangladesh
Joan Chandos Baez, American singer,
songwriter, musician, and activist
Stay Away from me (Bangladesh I)
Faiz Ahmed Faiz
How can I embellish this carnival of slaughter,
how decorate this massacre?
Whose attention could my lamenting blood attract?
There’s almost no blood in my rawboned body
and what’s left
isn’t enough to burn as oil in the lamp,
not enough to fill a wineglass.
It can feed no fire,
extinguish no thirst.
There’s a poverty of blood in my ravaged body—
a terrible poison now runs in it.
If you pierce my veins, each drop will foam
as venom at the cobra’s fangs.
Each drop is the anguished longing of ages’
the burning seal of a rage hushed up for years.
Beware of me. My body is a river of poison.
Stay away from me. My body is a parched log in the desert.
If you burn it, you won’t see the cypress or the jasmine,
but my bones blossoming like thorns in the cactus.
If you throw it in the forests,
instead of morning perfumes, you’ll scatter
the dust of my seared soul.
So stay away from me. Because I’m thirsting for blood.
(Translated from Urdu by Agha Shahid Ali)
Bangladesh II
Faiz Ahmed Faiz
This is how my sorrow became visible:
its dust, piling up for years in my heart,
finally reached my eyes,
the bitterness now so clear that
I had to listen when my friends
told me to wash my eyes with blood.
Everything at once was tangled in blood—
each face, each idol, red everywhere.
Blood swept over the sun, washing away its gold.
The moon erupted with blood, its silver extinguished.
The sky promised a morning of blood,
and the night wept only blood.
The trees hardened into crimson pillars.
All flowers filled their eyes with blood.
And every glance was an arrow,
each pierced image blood. This blood
—a river crying out for martyrs—
flows on in longing. And in sorrow, in rage, in love.
Let it flow. Should it be dammed up,
there will only be hatred cloaked in colors of death.
Don’t let this happen, my friends,
bring all my tears back instead,
a flood to purify my dust-filled eyes,
to was this blood forever from my eyes.
(Translated from Urdu by Agha Shahid Ali)
Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Pakistani poet, and
author in Urdu and Punjabi language
Bangladesh
George Harrison
My friend came to me, with sadness in his eyes
He told me that he wanted help
Before his country dies
Although I couldn’t feel the pain, I knew I had to try
Now I’m asking all of you
To help us save some lives
Bangla Desh, Bangla Desh
Where so many people are dying fast
And it sure looks like a mess
I’ve never seen such distress
Now won’t you lend your hand and understand
Relieve the people of Bangla Desh
Bangla Desh, Bangla Desh
Such a great disaster – I don’t understand
But it sure looks like a mess
I’ve never known such distress
Now please don’t turn away, I want to hear you say
Relieve the people of Bangla Desh
Relieve Bangla Desh
Bangla Desh, Bangla Desh
Now it may seem so far from where we all are
It’s something we can’t neglect
It’s something I can’t neglect
Now won’t you give some bread to get the starving fed
We’ve got to relieve Bangla Desh
Relieve the people of Bangla Desh
We’ve got to relieve Bangla Desh
Relieve the people of Bangla Desh
George Harrison, English musician, singer-songwriter,
and lead guitarist of the Beatles
September On Jessore Road
Allen Ginsberg
Millions of babies watching the skies
Bellies swollen, with big round eyes
On Jessore Road–long bamboo huts
Noplace to shit but sand channel ruts
Millions of fathers in rain
Millions of mothers in pain
Millions of brothers in woe
Millions of sisters nowhere to go
One Million aunts are dying for bread
One Million uncles lamenting the dead
Grandfather millions homeless and sad
Grandmother millions silently mad
Millions of daughters walk in the mud
Millions of children wash in the flood
A Million girls vomit & groan
Millions of families hopeless alone
Millions of souls nineteenseventyone
homeless on Jessore road under grey sun
A million are dead, the million who can
Walk toward Calcutta from East Pakistan
Taxi September along Jessore Road
Oxcart skeletons drag charcoal load
past watery fields thru rain flood ruts
Dung cakes on treetrunks, plastic-roof huts
Wet processions Families walk
Stunted boys big heads don’t talk
Look bony skulls & silent round eyes
Starving black angels in human disguise
Mother squats weeping & points to her sons
Standing thin legged like elderly nuns
small bodied hands to their mouths in prayer
Five months small food since they settled there
on one floor mat with small empty pot
Father lifts up his hands at their lot
Tears come to their mother’s eye
Pain makes mother Maya cry
Two children together in palmroof shade
Stare at me no word is said
Rice ration, lentils one time a week
Milk powder for warweary infants meek
No vegetable money or work for the man
Rice lasts four days eat while they can
Then children starve three days in a row
and vomit their next food unless they eat slow.
On Jessore road Mother wept at my knees
Bengali tongue cried mister Please
Identity card torn up on the floor
Husband still waits at the camp office door
Baby at play I was washing the flood
Now they won’t give us any more food
The pieces are here in my celluloid purse
Innocent baby play our death curse
Two policemen surrounded by thousands of boys
Crowded waiting their daily bread joys
Carry big whistles & long bamboo sticks
to whack them in line They play hungry tricks
Breaking the line and jumping in front
Into the circle sneaks one skinny runt
Two brothers dance forward on the mud stage
Teh gaurds blow their whistles & chase them in rage
Why are these infants massed in this place
Laughing in play & pushing for space
Why do they wait here so cheerful & dread
Why this is the House where they give children bread
The man in the bread door Cries & comes out
Thousands of boys and girls Take up his shout
Is it joy? is it prayer? “No more bread today”
Thousands of Children at once scream “Hooray!”
Run home to tents where elders await
Messenger children with bread from the state
No bread more today! & and no place to squat
Painful baby, sick shit he has got.
Malnutrition skulls thousands for months
Dysentery drains bowels all at once
Nurse shows disease card Enterostrep
Suspension is wanting or else chlorostrep
Refugee camps in hospital shacks
Newborn lay naked on mother’s thin laps
Monkeysized week old Rheumatic babe eye
Gastoenteritis Blood Poison thousands must die
September Jessore Road rickshaw
50,000 souls in one camp I saw
Rows of bamboo huts in the flood
Open drains, & wet families waiting for food
Border trucks flooded, food cant get past,
American Angel machine please come fast!
Where is Ambassador Bunker today?
Are his Helios machinegunning children at play?
Where are the helicopters of U.S. AID?
Smuggling dope in Bangkok’s green shade.
Where is America’s Air Force of Light?
Bombing North Laos all day and all night?
Where are the President’s Armies of Gold?
Billionaire Navies merciful Bold?
Bringing us medicine food and relief?
Napalming North Viet Nam and causing more grief?
Where are our tears? Who weeps for the pain?
Where can these families go in the rain?
Jessore Road’s children close their big eyes
Where will we sleep when Our Father dies?
Whom shall we pray to for rice and for care?
Who can bring bread to this shit flood foul’d lair?
Millions of children alone in the rain!
Millions of children weeping in pain!
Ring O ye tongues of the world for their woe
Ring out ye voices for Love we don’t know
Ring out ye bells of electrical pain
Ring in the conscious of America brain
How many children are we who are lost
Whose are these daughters we see turn to ghost?
What are our souls that we have lost care?
Ring out ye musics and weep if you dare–
Cries in the mud by the thatch’d house sand drain
Sleeps in huge pipes in the wet shit-field rain
waits by the pump well, Woe to the world!
whose children still starve in their mother’s arms curled.
Is this what I did to myself in the past?
What shall I do Sunil Poet I asked?
Move on and leave them without any coins?
What should I care for the love of my loins?
What should we care for our cities and cars?
What shall we buy with our Food Stamps on Mars?
How many millions sit down in New York
& sup this night’s table on bone & roast pork?
How many millions of beer cans are tossed
in Oceans of Mother? How much does She cost?
Cigar gasolines and asphalt car dreams
Stinking the world and dimming star beams–
Finish the war in your breast with a sigh
Come tast the tears in your own Human eye
Pity us millions of phantoms you see
Starved in Samsara on planet TV
How many millions of children die more
before our Good Mothers perceive the Great Lord?
How many good fathers pay tax to rebuild
Armed forces that boast the children they’ve killed?
How many souls walk through Maya in pain
How many babes in illusory pain?
How many families hollow eyed lost?
How many grandmothers turning to ghost?
How many loves who never get bread?
How many Aunts with holes in their head?
How many sisters skulls on the ground?
How many grandfathers make no more sound?
How many fathers in woe
How many sons nowhere to go?
How many daughters nothing to eat?
How many uncles with swollen sick feet?
Millions of babies in pain
Millions of mothers in rain
Millions of brothers in woe
Millions of children nowhere to go
(New York, November 14-16, 1971)
Irwin Allen Ginsberg, American poet and writer
