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Nepali poets in Bangladesh

Print Edition SATURDAY, 05 JANUARY 2013  (Bangladesh)
AUTHOR / SOURCE: HIRON CHOWDHURY
Weblink of the newspaper: 
http://www.theindependentbd.com/index.php?   option=com_content&view=article&id=149344:poems-by-two-young-nepali-poets&catid=123:art-culture&Itemid=217 
Poetry in Nepal is changing fast keeping link with its golden tradition. We are publishing here some poems by two Nepali poets, Keshab Sigdel and Prakash Subedi, belonging to the new generation. They recently took part in the third Darianagar International Poetry Fair held in Dhaka and Darianagar from 28 to 31 December 2012 along with a Peace Procession of Poetry from Dhaka to Cox’s Bazar, a unique event in the colourful poetic activities of Bangladesh.  About two hundred poets from SAARC and beyond attended the fair.
Keshab Sigdel is a poet/creative writer based in Kathmandu writing both in English and Nepali languages. He works at Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu, Nepal, as an assistant professor of English. His published works include Samaya Bighatan (2007), a collection of poems in Nepali, and Six Strings (2011), a co-authored anthology of poems in English.
He is also a co-editor of English literary magazine Of Nepalese Clay and  Devkota Studies, a bilingual research publication. Sigdel is affiliated with a number of literary organizations including Foundation of SARRC Writers and Literature, and International PEN Nepal Chapter.
He is also the Founding Member of Asia Pacific Writers and Translators' Association, Vice President of Society of Nepali Writers in English (NWEN), General Secretary of Literary Association of Nepal (LAN), and Director of the Department of Social Sciences and International Relations at the Asian Center for Humanities (ACH), Kathmandu. A poem by Keshab Sigdel  is being published  below:
Shadows of  War

At the courtyard
blossomed are the flowers—
in pink, red, and yellows.

The woman wakes up,
and each morning,
stretches her eyes till the road ends of her sight
in the hope that her husband
who disappeared some ten years ago might return.

She waited till she could;
but her husband never returned.
The last drop in her eyes rolled
and fell unaccounted, futile.
There was only one more thing she could do—
recollect the memories of the days bygone!

She remembered her husband
And gazed at the flowers he planted before he left his house in enforcement.
And, in the blooming flowers at the courtyard
She found the vigour for a continued wait.

Sometimes she would fear
when the flowers fell in their prime by the struck of their wind;

But the new buds that appeared
in all their beauty and fragrance
reinforced in her the verve
to renew her wait.

After a long cohabitation
suddenly today
she felt a chilling discomfort
with the flowers.
In them, she saw
the shadow of malice;
And when the flowers swayed along the tune  of the gentle eastern breeze,
she feared it a death-dance.
An epitome of nilakantha,
flowers gulped the
incrimination
and honoured the silence.
Without the knowledge
of the woman
flowers continued
to offer homage
to the dead body
of the woman’s husband
buried at the courtyard
of his own house. 

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