September on Jessore Road

Interesting poem. I feel it portrays what I felt in my last entry. Allen Ginsberg the American Beat Poet went to Bangladesh before it became West and East Bangladesh. This is a poem of his experience.

Millions of babies watching the skies

Bellies swollen, with big round eyes

On Jessore Road--long bamboo huts

No place to shit but sand channel ruts



Millions of fathers in rain

Millions of mothers in pain

Millions of brothers in woe

Millions of sisters nowhere to go



One Million aunts are dying for bread

One Million uncles lamenting the dead

Grandfather millions homeless and sad

Grandmother millions silently mad



Millions of daughters walk in the mud

Millions of children wash in the flood

A Million girls vomit & groan

Millions of families hopeless alone



Millions of souls nineteen seventy one

homeless on Jessore road under grey sun

A million are dead, the million who can

Walk toward Calcutta from East Pakistan



Taxi September along Jessore Road

Oxcart skeletons drag charcoal load

past watery fields thru rain flood ruts

Dung cakes on treetrunks, plastic-roof huts



Wet processions Families walk

Stunted boys big heads don't talk

Look bony skulls and silent round eyes

Starving black angels in human disguise



Mother squats weeping and points to her sons

Standing thin legged like elderly nuns

small bodied hands to their mouths in prayer

Five months small food since they settled there



on one floor mat with small empty pot

Father lifts up his hands at their lot

Tears come to their mother's eye

Pain makes mother Maya cry



Two children together in palmroof shade

Stare at me no word is said

Rice ration, lentils one time a week

Milk powder for war weary infants meek



No vegetable money or work for the man

Rice lasts four days eat while they can

Then children starve three days in a row

and vomit their next food unless they eat slow.



On Jessore road Mother wept at my knees

Bengali tongue cried mister Please

Identity card torn up on the floor

Husband still waits at the camp office door



Baby at play I was washing the flood

Now they won't give us any more food

The pieces are here in my celluloid purse

Innocent baby play our death curse



Two policemen surrounded by thousands of boys

Crowded waiting their daily bread joys

Carry big whistles and long bamboo sticks

to whack them in line They play hungry tricks



Breaking the line and jumping in front

Into the circle sneaks one skinny runt

Two brothers dance forward on the mud stage

The guards blow their whistles and chase them in rage



Why are these infants massed in this place

Laughing in play and  pushing for space

Why do they wait here so cheerful and dread?

Why this is the House where they give children bread



The man in the bread door Cries and comes out

Thousands of boys and girls Take up his shout

Is it joy? is it prayer? "No more bread today"

Thousands of Children at once scream "Hooray!"



Run home to tents where elders await

Messenger children with bread from the state

No bread more today! and and no place to squat

Painful baby, sick shit he has got.



Malnutrition skulls thousands for months

Dysentery drains bowels all at once

Nurse shows disease card Enterostrep

Suspension is wanting or else chlorostrep



Refugee camps in hospital shacks

Newborn lay naked on mother's thin laps

Monkeysized week old Rheumatic babe eye

Gastoenteritis Blood Poison thousands must die



September Jessore Road rickshaw

50,000 souls in one camp I saw

Rows of bamboo huts in the flood

Open drains, and wet families waiting for food



Border trucks flooded, food can’t get past,

American Angel machine please come fast!

Where is Ambassador Bunker today?

Are his Helios machine gunning children at play?



Where are the helicopters of U.S. AID?

Smuggling dope in Bangkok's green shade.

Where is America's Air Force of Light?

Bombing North Laos all day and all night?



Where are the President's Armies of Gold?

Billionaire Navies merciful Bold?

Bringing us medicine food and relief?

Napalming North Vietnnam and causing more grief?



Where are our tears? Who weeps for the pain?

Where can these families go in the rain?

Jessore Road's children close their big eyes

Where will we sleep when Our Father dies?



Whom shall we pray to for rice and for care?

Who can bring bread to this shit flood foul'd lair?

Millions of children alone in the rain!

Millions of children weeping in pain!



Ring O ye tongues of the world for their woe

Ring out ye voices for Love we don't know

Ring out ye bells of electrical pain

Ring in the conscious of America brain



How many children are we who are lost

Whose are these daughters we see turn to ghost?

What are our souls that we have lost care?

Ring out ye musics and weep if you dare--



Cries in the mud by the thatch'd house sand drain

Sleeps in huge pipes in the wet shit-field rain

waits by the pump well, Woe to the world!

whose children still starve in their mother's arms curled.



Is this what I did to myself in the past?

What shall I do Sunil Poet I asked?

Move on and leave them without any coins?

What should I care for the love of my loins?



What should we care for our cities and cars?

What shall we buy with our Food Stamps on Mars?

How many millions sit down in New York

and sup this night's table on bone and roast pork?



How many millions of beer cans are tossed

in Oceans of Mother? How much does She cost?

Cigar gasoline and asphalt car dreams

Stinking the world and dimming star beams--



Finish the war in your breast with a sigh

Come taste the tears in your own Human eye

Pity us millions of phantoms you see

Starved in Samsara on planet TV



How many millions of children die more

before our Good Mothers perceive the Great Lord?

How many good fathers pay tax to rebuild

Armed forces that boast the children they've killed?



How many souls walk through Maya in pain

How many babes in illusory pain?

How many families hollow eyed lost?

How many grandmothers turning to ghost?



How many loves who never get bread?

How many Aunts with holes in their head?

How many sisters skulls on the ground?

How many grandfathers make no more sound?



How many fathers in woe

How many sons nowhere to go?

How many daughters nothing to eat?

How many uncles with swollen sick feet?



Millions of babies in pain

Millions of mothers in rain

Millions of brothers in woe

Millions of children nowhere to go