WHEN THE WATER COMES

by Rajat Chandra Sarmah

This is not news to us.
It rains.
Then it rains more.
The river climbs the banks like a thief at night.

We don’t ask, Why is this happening?
We ask, How high this time?
We know the drill—
Carry the old woman upstairs,

tie the goats to the roof beam,
Put the school books in plastic.

My cousin’s house floated away last month.
Just slid into the Brahmaputra,

quiet as a boat pushing off.
The calendar was still on the wall—
June.

Floods are disasters for us.
But calendars for them.
They know when to show up.
Photo op. Speech.
Same promises, reshuffled.

Bangladesh, Bihar, Assam—
The same story,
different screens.

Sometimes I sit by the window
and wonder—
Is the river tired of carrying us?
Our plastics, our lost shoes,
our drowned gods?

The water comes again.
It will come next year too.
I don’t know anymore
If I should swim
Or just stand still.

Rajat Chandra Sarmah is a poet and writer, and a Fellow of LEAD International. a global network focused on leadership and sustainability. After a 36-year career in India’s power sector, he now focuses on poetry and literary writing. His work explores environmental crises, cultural inheritance, and personal memory.

THEY NAMED THEIR DUNGEONS A HOUSE OF MIRRORS

by Arshi Mortuza

The interim leader of Bangladesh, Muhammad Yunus, has told Sky News former prime minister Sheikh Hasina will stand trial for crimes against humanity. Ms Hasina is accused of overseeing a system of enforced disappearances during her time in government, as well as the mass killing of protesters in July and August last year.... Professor Yunus recently visited one of the now infamous secret jails, code-named the 'House of Mirrors.' The economics professor, known as the 'banker to the poor' and now chief adviser of Bangladesh, said he was beyond shocked at what he saw. "This is just the ugliest thing that you can see, you can feel, or you can observe," he said. —Sky News, March 5, 2025

As a Bangladeshi out of Bangladesh,
I’ll admit it felt too sudden for me,
Like the flipping of a switch.

The flipping of a switch that sent them scurrying
Like rodents and roaches,
Leaving behind trails of their filth
And the crumbs they had hoarded.
Leaving the nation to unearth
Atrocities—buried and burrowed.

The audacity—
To give torture cells a poetic name:
Ayna Ghor—House of Mirrors
A glass prison that entrapped
Our fathers and brothers.
A name that reflected their distorted minds,
Their inner vermin.

But it all came to light, eventually—
Each shard of the mirror
Igniting flames and upheaval
Amongst a nation once plagued.

A nation that is free to denounce
A venomous matriarch
Without the fear of Ayna Ghor.

Arshi Mortuza is a Bangladeshi writer in her late 20s, currently based in Canada. She is the author of One Minute Past Midnight and is working on Pressed Flower, a manuscript exploring preservation and entrapment. She can be found on Instagram as @poetessarshi

A STITCH IN...

by Maria Lisella

Tell clothing brands to support workers by signing the Transparency Pledge. The vast majority of workers do not know whom to turn to for improving their working conditions because the brands they make clothes for are kept secret. This lack of transparency allows brands to avoid accountability and fuels abuses against workers. Transparency benefits workers—they can inform brands when they experience labor abuses. Transparency also helps brands—they can better take steps to stop and prevent labor abuses. Currently, 40 companies have committed to the Transparency Pledge, but hundreds continue to hide where they make their clothes. Workers and shoppers deserve to know where brands make their clothes. This shopping season, call on American Eagle Outfitters, Armani, Carrefour and URBN (Urban Outfitters, Free People, Anthropologie, Nuuly) to support workers by publishing a list of all factories that make their branded products. —Human Rights Watch

It required a stitch or two and so I tacked it
the two tabs that were sticking out
of her cheap striped shirt—
made in Bangladesh reads the label
where women who know nothing
about raised fists of labor united or
the IWW, or the AFL-CIO, sweat
for 14 hours a day, and 35 cents an hour
turn out shirts just like this one stitched
with labels that read: H&M, Calvin Klein,
Ann Taylor, Zara, Target and, yet,
when a factory goes up in flames or
crumbles to the ground in New Delhi,
Bangladesh, Ahmedabad, collapsing
into tangles of steel, concrete blocks,
mortar, or fizzle in flames, the label-owners
deny those women have ever
been making their products and those
women have nothing to do with their
$2.4 trillion dollars in profits.


Maria Lisella is the outgoing Queens Poet Laureate and a newly-named fellow of the American Academy of Poets; she is a travel writer by trade.

LITTLE ROHINGYA

by Probal Basak

Myanmar's leader Aung San Suu Kyi is expected to defend her military against allegations of genocide at the International Court of Justice. The army is accused of targeting the country's Rohingya Muslim minority in 2017. A documentary being aired on Al Jazeera sheds new light on the abuses. Al Jazeera's Osama Bin Javaid reports. —Al Jazeera, November 24, 2019

I’m Alfred, Suu, caged
in your dark cabinet. Once
a gilded trophy, now stained
with blood, Suu, I am here,
seeking freedom from fear.

Omar appears in my dreams
as red tears from the beachfront
of Cox’s Bazar flow like a stream,
Suu, do you know little Omar?

Omar met me at the town square at midnight,
waking from nightmares after the family burial,
to share dreams of rowing across the bloody sea.
In the fog of gunpowder, I walked by his side over
bruised sisters, raped mothers, dead fathers,
brothers boot-stamped.

No, Omar didn’t ask me to desert you,
Suu. It’s me, haunted by bloodshed,
your glittering bearded Alfred.
It’s time you loosen my harness.

Oh! Suu, my silent mistress!
I too want to cross over to join
Omar at Cox’s Bazar.

Oh!  The power of powerless
chokes me here, Suu, I am here,
seeking freedom from fear.

Probal Basak is employed as on officer with the Department of Information & Cultural Affairs, Government of West Bengal, India. His parents, refugees from Bangladesh, settled in West Bengal during the 1971 India-Pakistan war. Probal grew up hearing stories of of the suffering of millions of migrated people.

FOR FASHION SAKE: RANA PLAZA REMEMBERED

by Darrell Petska

The bodies of a man and woman as they embrace in their last moments from the collapse of a garment factory in Rana Plaza building.
Photo by Taslima Akhter   |   Savar, Bangladesh   |   April 25, 2013
Image source: Raw Journalism

Rana Plaza a year on: did fast-fashion brands learn any lessons at all? Some 1,133 garment workers died yet profits from cheap clothes have soared.
--The Observer, April 20, 2014

A year after Rana Plaza: What hasn’t changed since the Bangladesh factory collapse.
--The Washington Post, April 18, 2014

If spirits ascending outworn bodies
sing life's value

then what a chorus a thousand raised
though Rana Plaza crumbled
to the indifferent click of dice
and money's soulless shuffle!

One year on, millions of hands
operating millions of sewing machines
in thousands of Rana Plaza lookalikes
make hand-to-rack clothes fast,
cheap, and disposable--apparel
and their makers mere commodities
valued a day then shed
for the next fashionable thing

cherished dreams and personal lives
of laboring souls be damned.
Torn from families and home,
Rana's dead remind us still

life and love abide in our hearts,
not our closets.


Darrell Petska, writing from Madison, Wisconsin, is a freelance editor in adult education who previously worked as a mental health caseworker, nursing home evaluator, and university editor. Past publications include Modern Haiku, Verse Wisconsin, ProtestPoems.org and others.

LAST DAYS: A RANT

by George Held

Between November 9–11, 2013, a large iceberg finally separated from the calving front of Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier. Scientists first detected a rift in the glacier in October 2011 during flights for NASA’s Operation IceBridge. By July 2013, infrared and radar images indicated that the crack had cut completely across the ice shelf to the southwestern edge. New images now show that Iceberg B-31 is finally moving away from the coast, with open water between the iceberg and the edge of Pine Island Glacier. --NASA

                          The watchword to my remarks [on halting global warming] is urgency.
                                                      –Bill McKibben, Brown Alumni Monthly


How few dare face the fatality we face:
Our electrified, motorized civilization
Pollutes the planet; mammoth enterprises
Fight for scarce resources, including water,
“The new oil.”

Will your grandchildren have a pure drop
To drink unless your children
Can afford to pay hundreds of dollars
Per gallon? Will the poor, driven mad
By thirst, revolt with Kalashnikovs,

IED’s, machetes to seize water supplies
for their families? All that storm water flooding
and drowning Kansas and the Philippines,
Bangladesh and the Jersey Shore
And not a drop to drink.

Scientists report time is short, even Al Gore’s
100 years sound far too optimistic,
Yet what are you doing right now to stem
Our reliance on fossil fuels and advance
Our shift to renewable, sun and wind, power?

Right now what are you doing to save Mother
Earth from the ravages of global warming,
to keep air breathable, water drinkable,
Life livable? Do it, right now, for the last days
Are near. Tomorrow is too late.


An occasional contributor to The New Verse News, George Held occasionally blogs at www.georgeheld.blogspot.com