Shabdaguchha
Issue 35/36
January-June '07
Double Issue, 48pp
Poetry Originally Written in English
By Hassanal Abdullah
A LOVE POEM
America, you are not
The United States I thought,
You are just a bank teller,
Sitting behind the bulletproof glass window
And advancing mount of money to the people
You like.
THE CAT
A cat I don’t want to miss,
Sitting in my house and eating some fish—
It’s not short, the cat is tall.
Its eyes are as if two hot bowls.
The cat knows math and poetry too—
The sun goes round the galaxy;
At time, it fixes my hair and ties my shoe.
It knows when the birds are free.
Stars are moving away from us,
Big Bang, Big Crunch, it knows the drum.
It knows how to get on a bus,
While eating some bones and chewing some gums.
The cat is a cat, it’s not a dog.
It has two legs and two hands,
It knows Calc and it knows Log.
It’s happy to live in the Bush-Land.
By Zheng Yan
ALL THAT I SEE
As the pale white flesh lies still in the darkness of the sky, I walk the path of shadow, and bear the ways of it, though I am not the only traveler. The darken chains hang from my shoulders; drops
of blood stream from my hands, and there I travel alone, with the skulls of the fallen hanging from my neck. The trail that I leave behind are the sorrow and death. I stock the plains for flesh, alone. The wandering soul is my guide. The decaying corpse is what I eat. Crawling through the dead bodies I see all, the true faces of the ones laid before me. Alone that I bear what has become of me, alone that I seek what has become my goal. As the tears of blood rains from my eyes, my mind gets clearer. I lay still in river which bathes the fallen. There I feel the pain in the emptiness of the shadow.
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Shabdaguchha, A Journal of Poetry, Published in New York, Edited by Hassanal Abdullah.