Poem: Tonight I could

Mosarrap Hossain Khan

- Mosarrap H Khan

Tonight I could write a love poem

Conjuring your absence into presence
Listening to Iqbal Bano’s lilting pathos
Tonight I could.

Tonight I could write a poem of hope
Having borne the virus for 120 days
Now oozing from every pore
Tonight I could.

Tonight I could write a poem of resistance
Babies clinging to their mother’s breasts 
Women rising bewitched by the flag
Tonight I could. 

Tonight I could write a poem of revolution
Time wafting across a hallucinating poet’s eyes
Trembling arm forming a final salute 
Tonight I could. 

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Bio: Mosarrap Hossain Khan teaches at O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, Haryana, India. He is a founding-editor at Café Dissensus magazine.

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Setu, July 2020

Grief

Mosarrap Hossain Khan

- Mosarrap H Khan

Grief has a way of hollowing

itself out, with each craving
for empathy. With each soothing arm on
your back, with each hug, grief lingers
like the ones who have passed on.
Grief, the dark belly of a whale,
loosens its caressing arm, when alone.
In silence, in private, in the dark belly
of the whale, we heal.

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Bio: Mosarrap H Khan is an academic based in a small town, Kotulpur, West Bengal, India. His creative pieces have previously appeared on The Bombay Review, The Sunflower Collective, Asia Writes Project, and Café Dissensus Everyday.

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Setu, July 2018

Three Poems By Mosarrap H Khan

Mosarrap Hossain Khan

- Mosarrap H Khan

Contented

We snuggle close like two

expectant adolescent youth.

Each of our measured movements

is meant to walk a well-trodden

path. Each curve, each concave,

each convex of her taut skin

I have known. The way one tip-toes

on a dark staircase, when the lights

go out on a wintry night.

I know when she will reach

the crescendo of excitement.

And then we will hold

On to each other’s limpness.    

I am back at my desk

by the window, contented,

to write Nirbhaya’s pain.

As if poetry and I will ever know

what it meant to be scooped out

bit-by-bit, and thrown down the

untrodden path of fear. 

Pain

I have neatly numbered the poems.
A collection of sorts, I presume,
will take shape.

I presume.
Because I have embraced those uncertainties,
which make you feel you could be a poet.

I have tried to write tonight –
a fragment of what I think would
one day become a novel.

Pain can’t be narrated
like the scene in a novel. Pain jabs at
you. Short, sharp, pointed jabs.

Like the lines of a poem. 

Mumbai

In this jumble of human forms,
you gain a sense of perspective –
A tiny speck swirling in a
sonic disaster.

You bid goodbye to a foreign
city you loved and partially embraced;
A city, you were never sure, if ever
loved you and embraced you back.

You stood there brooding, longing,
secure in the knowledge
of human mastery over space; an imposing tower
lording over rectangular grids.

Here you swirl, float, duck,
along with particles of dust,
soot, muck, disease, like cigarette-smoke
curling up before vanishing abruptly.

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Bio: Mosarrap H Khan is an academic based in a small town, Kotulpur, West Bengal, India. His creative pieces have previously appeared on The Bombay Review, The Sunflower Collective, Asia Writes Project, and Café Dissensus Everyday.

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Setu, July 2017