A Weaver Bird of Light

Written by Batullah Quaderee

Translated from the Bengali by Hassanal Abdullah

Narrated by Bill Wolak

Bangladesh

Who asked me to

weave the light?

Could anyone ever

weave light like this?

It’s

not like

knitting

a wollen sweater,

that would be finished before winter.

The eggs of light

arranged in rows,

in a circular array,

it has been spinning around

while clustered in a drop of water—

Is it easy to

weave that

light?

 

A festival of men and women.

They are now meeting

at the edge of each other’s desire.

In a consumerless dusk,

long and pale;

after all the hugging and kissing,

they ignite the light

and

then switch it off faster.

And I reckon I am not at all

in my own habitude,

having gone to

loverland

burning my flesh.

A flock of birds,

faster than sound,

burns me with its fire,

and I

then keep on

weaving the light,

like a weaver

bird.

 

 

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.