Marriage / Abu Karim

Why do people get married?

Why, for living at home, are they worried?

For me marriage meant making two single mattresses

from Shamsunnahar Hall and Muhsin Hall seamless into one

with a double bed and bed sheet in the slum of Golapbagh

making arrangement for sleeping.

And sometimes, when that bed sheet got dirty

it was to have good washing.

Still today I wonder why I could not come to think of

making the two mattresses one;

that is why my doors remain closed,

and I find my keys somewhere gone.

I cherished a dream for a little home for me

that I would so long see

with an intimate secrecy.

I thought that marriage would be a step

to implement that disheveled dream,

but now I see not only our mattresses

but also our cotton quilts are separate

with a clear seam.

We pass our nights with our respective friends

under our separate cotton quilts

when with bird songs dawn appears to build;

tube roses bloom in gardens; for depriving each,

both of us are with equal guilt.

This March will declare twenty fifth year of our marriage;

so many days we have passed lying in a shabby bed

without dreams having the pose of gentleness on heads.

Will any one be able to know

why we have not hurt each other bloodied?

Marriage

means getting fried in soybean oil with ease

to be fried again in ghee.

Actually, there is no difference;

the two have similarity of the same place.

We two have come from different places of our own

and thought we would gradually know one another upon

time and the veil of mystery will itself unfold.

Now on the twenty fifth year of marriage I find

that mystery has multiplied many folds.

The seeds of mystery have grown flowers and fruits.

In the complex web of oblivion someone has

thrown us knocked, and we are groping behind

endless clouds.

12 January 2004

‘বিয়ে’ কবিতার অনুবাদ

[Translated by Dulal Al Monsur]