Omar Ali is a college professor and has been a prolific poet with a penchant for using demotic language.

Hasina

Hasina, your face soft with the glow of kantali champa
Is beautiful. You are East Bengal’s pretty girl
Your footprints on the quiet dusty courtyard
Are gold. At your touch everything comes alive.

Hasina, your voice is a flute playing in the distant meadow.
Its music enchants the affectionate shade of the hijal tree,
The noonday mango and neem groves, river bank,
Paddy fields and sandy plains. You are beautiful,
You raise a thrill in the wind.

This land is yours, this land is mine, it
Is everybody’s, Hasina. The blue bird that
Calls from the shimul branch is our bird.
The river that flows smoothly over there
Is our river. Ours the sunshine and the darkness.

Hasina, you and I shall live in this world
For some days. In bright spring and pale winter.

– Kabir Chowdhury