This week’s poem inspired by a many-hour drive through the lovely landscape of Bangladesh.

Landscape

hazy hot sky over squares and rectangles of green, brown, seedlings waving weakly above water, muddy stubble, golden harvests, sliced by brick lined bustling roads. hard trampled bunds splitting land from water, green from grey, wet from damp. everywhere lined by tall straight-stemmed timber trees, brick and mud thatch houses. corrugated and tiled roofs, shiny, rusty-rimmed sharp edges. puddles, muddled homesteads circled by dark rings of fruit trees, heavy with green mangos, wide leafed jackfruit trees with lumpy fruit-swelling trunks. sweet smell of growth battling decay, thriving dying rotting ripening, mouldy compost, flowers fruit.  irregular quadrangled deep green ponds flashing twisting fish, washing splashing, ducks, children, long black glossy dripping hair and gleaming liquid limbs. bamboo groves, sharp skin-slicing leaves, elegantly bowing yellow stretching stems. mushroom-pretty piles of rice straw, odd-angled sheds, poultry houses. knife-backed rib-caged yellow cows, grubby sheep, clucking, ducking laying, brooding hens. wide sluggish grey-green rivers meander fat and lazy through energetic country-side. heaving markets, exhaling humid heat, clinging dust. piles, sacks, bundles, bags, rice, spice, fruit, spinach, spinney-ash-snake-sweet-bitter heaps of gourd, amethyst aubergines, bursting jackfruit spewing sick-sweet breath. black-haired nodding heads, henna beards, arms legs, lean-muscled sweat-shining bodies, bangladesh.

Rajshahi, 2015