Man and Earth - Hayat Saif

All around one can witness

Many high-ranking and garrulous asses –

Occasionally worthy, but always affecting wisdom –

Here, these clamorous men live.

Yet in the blood-stained center of this small planet,

What a multiplicity of frightening

Relationship exist,

Stained and stung by mud sand-stone parasite,

Roots, branches, insects, and men,

Get hit by atomic explosion, reduced

To muddy heaps of flesh.

In all directions lie, scattered social contrarieties.

The center falls and there is a marked

Lack of cohesion,

For men are powerless in the grip

of mutual malice.

In marshes, briars, and untended fields

As though creeping out of a large dust-bin

Congregate all the world's noisome waste-

Those who propitiate the lords

With dissembling bows

Themselves use their fellow human-beings to

attain to affluence

A fake man of God, graves covered with

blazing red cloth

The waving green flag amid an epidemic or

scorched by a heat-wave.

And yet man is always in need of faith

Not so birds or animals.

Therefore one can hope one day faith reality

The visible and the invisible insects worms

mud and sand-stone

Will all co-mingle in an ultimate understanding

between man and earth

And from the blood-stained red earth

under the cosmic sky

Will emerge the bud of a huge

dazzling white water lily.

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Hayat Saif [Saiful Islam Khan] (1942 – 2019) Bangladesh

Source: Poetry Nook