Issue: Vol. IV, No. 1, May-July, 2025
About Whom I Write Poetry
About whom I write poetry
Poetry does not reach them
Not knowing themselves the raw material
of commodity-literature
they left this world
For example, a raped child
A slain maiden by her beloved
A wife burnt alive
A self-murdered man in famine
The two boys who slept forever in mob lynching
Love of a wife boiled in pressure cooker
The limbs of the beloved
frozen inside the refrigerator…
The hands to bless or failed revolutions
We made joyful ladder of literature
Frustration can’t be hidden
because the loud scream of poetry
can’t move even a hair on the skin
The rapists too born out of mothers’ wombs
They chased fun
On the path of birth
Where through we see the earth
Does anyone see the future of Fate?
Where the children learn the lesson of rape
There the sage commits mistake by comparing
Human with animal
The meanest of the mankind surpassed by the animal
in the test of restraint
The children cannot sleep with their smiles
Where there’s the advertisement of fearlessness
Jay ho, be victorious, Macbeth, be victorious, Prospero
We can’t save you
We can’t heal the wound of the soul
The rapist or an assassin
also finds a lawyer
Happiness and sorrow rotate around livelihood
Jay ho, be victorious
Hail belly, hail rice
We are digital tigers
Constantly roaring in Facebook
Pulling away our teeth
the creator is singing lullabies
About War
If they can hear the cry
I would scream— let’s stop the war.
I am an ordinary being
I can’t settle the quarrel of the cows among the herd on the path
Through the field
How do I address the atomic powers
who has stained
Innumerable sprouting hands
with sharp sickle
Blood stain on the iron stuff
Life dies in the stings of ants
War makes us immigrants
No security even on mother’s lap
where will the baby sleep
No warmth of the faded sun remains
who will melt the ice
Who has no capacity to create an atom of dust
We look towards his face
thinking he will protect us
Translated by Gitali Saikia
Rajib Bora is an Assamese poet, novelist and critic. He has published six collections of poems. He teaches Assamese literature in Nazira College, Sivsagar, Assam.
Dr Gitali Saikia is a critic and translator of Assam. She teaches in the Department of English, HCDG College, Nitaipukhuri, Sivasagar, Assam.