Her Body Turns Red

Written by Baitullah Quaderee

Translated from the Bengali by Hassanal Abdullah

Narrated by Bill Wolak

Bangladesh

 

I see her dancing like the central glare of alluvial fire.

From her naked thighs and fire-soft sleeping navel,

the aroma of ghee gallops through the air.

Erudite, her body comes up laughing

from a vast reservoir of pre-historic symbols—

the sun kept in it, as if it were her breast mark.

She becomes elegant, even brighter than that—

since the world hides beneath her assembled seat.

Her body gets red from the wild flame.

Her body gets slim from the dancing fire.

Her vagina turns into a flaming star with the dancing fire.

And the flame keeps on burning smoke free

under her consensus,

keeping the scatter history behind.

The sleeping moth of the king

performs the butterfly vow—

I see her dancing like the central glare of alluvial fire,

dancing her navel, the breast mark,

and the eternal burning light as the elusive flint.

 

 

Baitullah Quaderee was born in Bangladesh and is the author of 7 collections of poetry.He is a professor of Bangladeshi literature at Dhaka University. Dr. Quaderee got his PhD in 2007 from the same university on Bengali Poetry of the 60s: Subject Matters and Techniques and received the Shabdaguchha Poetry Award in 2003.

Hassanal Abdullah is a Bangladeshi-American poet, translator, and critic. He is the 2016 recipient of the Homer European Medal of Poetry and Art and 2019 translation grant of the Queens Council on the Arts. An author of 43 books in different genres including an epic, Abdullah is the editor of Shabdaguchha, an International Bilingual Poetry Magazine, since 1998.