This Valley of Death is Not My Country

(Translated from the Bangla poem Ei Mrityu Upotyawka Amar Desh Na by Nabarun Bhattacharya with a few alterations)

I spit on the father who fears to point at his child’s corpse

I spit on the brother and his shameless sanity despite everything

I spit on the teacher, the intellectual, the poet and the clerk

who do not seek to avenge this bloodbath out in the open

Seventeen corpses

lie stretched across the pathway of reckoning

I am losing my senses bit by bit

Seventeen open pairs of eyes look at me in sleep

I scream out

I will turn insane

I will kill myself

I will do whatever I want to do

I will eat the sun, the moon and the stars

I will smash all bridges between the viewer and the viewed

This is the exact time for poetry

Through stenciled manifestos on naked walls

A collage crafted of own blood, tears and bones –

now is the time for poetry

in the torn face of severest pain

right now is the time to hurl poetry

face to face with real terror –

keeping eyes fixed at the blinding headlight of the vans

at the three naught three and whatever else the killers have

It is time to face them with poetry

Through stone-cold lock-up chambers

Shattering the yellow lamps of crime investigation cells

In courthouses run by murderers

In seats of learning that teach lies and spew venoms of hatred

In the state machine churning abuse and terror

In the heartless chest of gunmen who serve that machine –

Let the anger of poetry echo out in fury

Let the poets of the world prepare themselves, like Lorca,

for their strangled corpses to disappear

let them be ready to be stitched up by machine-gun bullets

the hours beckon

the city of poetry must be surrounded by villages of poetry.

this valley of death is not my country

this executioner’s theater is not my country

this vast charnel-ground is not my country

this blood-drenched slaughterhouse is not my country

I will snatch my country back

I will pull the fog-kissed white kans flowers, the crimson dusks and the endless rivers

back into my chest

With all my body I shall surround the fireflies, forests burning in ancient hills,

countless crops of hearts, flowers, humans and horses from fairytales

I shall name each star after each martyr

I shall call out to the howling breezes, lights and shadows playing across the fish-eyed lakes of dawn

And Love – banished to places lightyears away ever since I was born:

I shall call it too, to join the carnival of the day of Revolution.

I reject

Days and nights of interrogation with a thousand watts of electricity blazing straight into eyeballs

I reject

Electric needles inside fingernails

I reject

Having to lie naked on chunks of ice

I reject

Being hanged upside down till blood gushes out of nostrils

I reject

Spiked boots pressed on lips, burning iron rods on every inch of skin

I reject

The sudden blast of alcohol on whiplashed back

I reject

Stark electric jolts on the nerves, pieces of rocks shoved inside vaginas, scrotums mangled to pulp

I reject

Being beaten and thrashed to death

I reject

Revolver-muzzles stuck against craniums

Poetry is eternal, irrepressible

Poetry is armed, poetry is free, poetry is fearless

Behold the warriors –

Mayakovsky, Hikmet, Neruda, Aragon, Eluard –

Look at them looking at you from the clouds.

Call out loud.

We haven’t let your poetry lose

A new epic is being written throughout the land

Prosodies and dactyls are raising their hungry heads

in guerrilla meters and rhythms.

Dhamsas, Madals roar their beats of wild anger out

Tribal hamlets stand like coral islands

Indigo fields reddened with blood

A river named Titas and

those poison hoods of king cobra dangling

from her wounded face.

Death-soaked aconites spread toxic roots

Bowstrings of warrior heroes from lores and epics ready to hurl arrows that blind the sun

Sharpest edges of wildest swords,

Pointed, poisoned tips of lancets, spears, javelins, shafts

glistening in their mad rage, charging out to reclaim all lost shores

Blood-eyed tribal-totems swaying to angry beats of a million drums –

all thunder out in perfect accord

and there are guns, cutlasses and daggers

and there is courage heaped up in piles, alive and vital

so much of courage that there’s nothing to fear anymore!

And there are cranes, severe, tusked bulldozers, processions, convoys,

dynamos in motion,  turbines, lathe-machines sweating in workshops of heroes

Stern diamond-eyes shining through methane darkness of trapped mine-slides

strange strong hammers made of iron

A thousand hands raised against bleary skies of dockyards, jutemills, against boiling pits of furnaces,

tons of coal fuming in acid vendetta, blazing in the life-maddened gall

to reclaim all that there was

and all that there shall ever be.

No, there’s nothing to fear anymore.

The pale face of fear belongs to some stranger

when I know that Death is nothing but Love.

If I am killed, I shall become a million tiny flames

and spread across all the earthen lamps of the world

I am eternal

I shall return each season, each year, each aeon

as the green hope of soil

I am eternal

I shall stay in joy, I shall stay in sorrow

I shall live through each new birth and cremation

As long as the world is alive

As long as human beings are alive.