The Need For Brave People Poem by Mohon Raihan

I'll tear out your avaricous tongues.
You who utter fantasies and call yourselves poets.
We don't need the tree of art
that has no root in the depth of the soil.
Today we need art for life's sake.
We want to get back the smell of the earth.
Today with an angry pledge in my chest
I want to spread a conflagration
in the corridors of time.

Today with my resolute hand
I'll pull off your head the false crown
of the poet you wear.
I spit, spit, spit at your face!
I am not going to accord you
the slightest respect.
You, dumb cowardly teachers,
bastard bootlicking intellectuals,
I'll crush your skull with a tremendous blow.

From the anger seething in the chest
of a twenty-year-old youngman,
from the blazing vigour of youth
shining like a new weapon
I'll hurl my fierce anger like a handgrenade
at the fake intellectuals writers teachers
poets and moth-eaten politicians.
I trample under my two feet
the data provided by the bourgeoisie economists.
Who says that this soil, this water, these men
and these ploughs have failed?
I do not accept the talk of food shortage
in this land so rich in crops,
I do not accept it at all.
I kick at imperialism and her planning experts.
What we need today are brave people!

Today we need a noble and resolute teacher,
tender like the crucified Jesus.
Today we need heroic intellectuals
who can give sparks of fire like a furnace.
Today we need poets who cherish in their heart
both flowers and gunpowder.

In our rib-bones the ignominy of our failure aches.
One day our humiliation despair pain anger
will find its way to a bloody revenge
through a hidden trigger.
I love rivers water flowers birds,
yet green health and sanity and tender
hands of affection have not
come back into my life.
Oh, where did'they lose mother's loving glance?

I pine, I bleed,
I spend sleepless hours, sleepless nights, sleepless life,
but still some people dream of palaces.
They want to ride the chariot of dreams
and have a coloured life.

The professors agricultural expents surgeons
medical men engineers technicians scientists
of this land
sit in planes,
they look at the smiling faces of pretty
airhostesses
and smoothly arrive in USA, in Europe,
and currently, in large numbers,
in the countries of the middle East.

Our one-time leftists now rush to Sri Lanka
like shoals of hilsa fishes swimming
against the current with the first rains.
The weapons of Satanic imperialism,
disguised in democracy's garb,
dance again and again.
See, how the octopus tries to strangle
the voice of the people at every opportune
moment.

Our uneducated politicians have little understanding
of culture.
They understand better the art of elections.
Today the beloved, forgetting the nature of love,
craves money and wealth
and the parents like greedy crows
hovering around holy shrines lie in wait
for golden chances
The professors write cheap notes
and make quick money,
while the intellectuals sell themselves happily
and lend their names to vile antipeople
statements.

Now no student studies medicine
with the aim of serving the distressed.
Now no engineer cherishes any noble goal.
All are direct or indirect agents
of the ruler or the exploiter.
in the villages they lecture on self-reliance,
and on returning to the city
avidly kiss the lips of the donor countries
and suck the blood of their own countrymen.

We have no grief for death
We have no love for birth
There is no remedy today that can stop
our destruction.
Everything we have brings us only the debris
of our deceptions and failures.
Let a true teacher be born here today
Let a true intellectual flourish here today
Let there be a resurrection here of tree poets
and writers.
Today let them lift their proud heads
and sparkle in the darkness
like flashing flashing flashing firearms!