Poems in English / Land, water and paddy
New Paddy
The way the koi fish climbs onto dry land on its gills after the first storm-rain of Baishakh,and, at a slightly different pace, the mud snake comes up onto the homestead —will anyone take this road again?
At the last full stop of that question I have sown your footprint,and some seed paddy of separation,because the village keeps a few more successful storms in reserve.
After this I will go north, looking for work, hoping for a day's food.North,where the aush paddy is going under the flood water.South, where the beel is full of fish and no one has sown the granary of dreams.
Still the ox, unyoked, goes calling and calling to the far edge of the field.North, someone with a questioning mind has turned off along the ridge-path towards the endless.And I have kept you —in the sound of an enchanting flute, counting the days, without any notation.
Perhaps one night you crossed this haor with a bridegroom,
to grow some new paddy. In the soil of my sorrow.
Masud Pathik. Translated from the Bengali.
- aush
- the early rice crop, sown before the monsoon and often lost to the first floods.
- Baishakh
- the first month of the Bengali year, mid-April to mid-May, when the season's violent storms arrive.
- beel
- a large shallow water body left in a flood plain; it fills in the monsoon and shrinks in the dry season.
- haor
- a bowl-shaped wetland of north-eastern Bangladesh, a wide inland sea in the monsoon and farmland in the dry months.
- koi
- a climbing perch, a fish able to move over land for short distances after rain.