Poems of Jewel Mazhar

Death of the Sphinx

Silence seems like a stone.
The Sphinx watches over it alone.

Suddenly she breaks her own ban,
Starts to talk.

As she unriddles her riddles
Words become knives and get stuck on her back.

Then Death flares up.
The riddle pursues.

The Rubicon

Before me flows the Rubicon,
Stands the Pul-Sirat,
Spreads the harsh and horrid moonless night.

All alone, I face them all—
With no boat, no horse, no provisions—
I stand smaller than a Pygmy.

And within my broken, battered, dwarfish frame,
My blood, bile, phlegm, spittle, semen, and saliva—
All are hardening like granite
Beneath the endless icy chill.

And a blizzard, hissing and howling now and then—
and the uncanny, savage frost—
engulfing me from head to toe.

The typhoidal fluids that run down my nostrils
Tears that ooze from my eyes
Do not fall on the ground.
Instead, they hang in the air
Like the Norse gods’ spears!

Countless anthills stretch behind me.
From behind them
Furry-eared jackals wink with gleaming eyes.
Medusa, Manasa, and Kaali loll out
Their cloud-licking tongues.

I have no swords—
So my fingernails are my swords!

Shall I cower?
—-No, I shall not!

With boundless courage,
Upright and firm,
On one leg I stand!

Smaller than a Pygmy,
Yet I am on my own—
With no boat, no weapon, no horse
No provisions.

I am blowing into my bellows,
I am telling myself, Arise! Awake!

I have no horse—
Yet an untamable steed is being bred within me.

With bruised and battered legs, I leap—
I swim across a river of sulfur,
Longer than my life.

I will push through this horrid moonless night.
I will prevail and win.
I will cross the Rubicon.

Jewel Mazhar is a poet, translator, and retired journalist. Former Editor of the banglanews24.com, Bangladesh’s largest online news portal. He has been acclaimed for poetry, translations, and a lifelong literary journey that has successfully transcends borders. Jewel Mazhar was born in 1964, in Sakhra, a village of Netrakona district in Bangladesh, of Mukdam Ali and Noorjahan Soru. Jewel lives in the city of Dhaka, with his longtime friend, partner Shirin Sultana and their son Arko Mazhar. In early youth Jewel absconded from home. In those vagabond-days he had to undertake a whole lot of odd and uncanny jobs to survive, which include operating roadside food-stall, peddling of petty stuff, budding up with workers and labourers… sleeping on the concrete benches at Brahmanbaria or Akhaura railway-stations at night. A large part of Jewel’s youth was spent in the north-eastern hills of Bangladesh. Always-an-outsider Jewel never returned to his paternal home in the proper sense of the term. Jewel abhors borders (“pigsty fences” in his words) that fragment the world.
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