I am an exiled star;
Born in the damp soil of Bangladesh,
My address is now the sky of France
Yet, on no map
Are the boundaries of my heart drawn.
Every morning,
A man awakens within the mirror;
He wears my face,
But deep within his eyes
Lie the ruins of another universe.
I ask him
“Are you truly alive?”
He offers no answer;
Only his shadow
Builds a new country upon the wall.
In that land, there are no borders,
No barbed wire,
No language is the enemy of another;
There, upon a bird’s wing,
The Bengali alphabet takes flight,
And perching on a French window,
Sings the song of human freedom.
Yet, the world remains
Imprisoned in a jail of its own making;
Humans fear their own shadows,
Machines tally human dreams,
And in the darkness of night,
An invisible algorithm
Measures the length of our loneliness.
Then, I take up my pen
From the ink, a question is born:
Is a human merely a statistic of existence,
Or an unfinished protest
Upon the bosom of eternity?
My poem is not an answer;
It is a doorway
Beyond which stand
My lost childhood,
My unborn future,
And that person
Who still believes
That love is not the property of any state.
I am
A living utterance
Standing between two lands;
My roots lie deep in the soil,
My dreams reach beyond the stars.
The day the final border vanishes,
The day humans recognize one another
Before acknowledging identities,
Perhaps my exile will end
Or I shall realize
That I was never truly exiled;
It was merely the world
That had forgotten the path back home.
About the Poet
Abu Zubier is a Bangladeshi poet, writer, and cultural activist currently residing in France. Themes such as humanity, freedom, social justice, identity crises, and questions regarding human existence hold a significant place in his literary work. While remaining rooted in the Bengali language and culture, he writes in support of the shared experiences of humanity and multicultural dialogue.
