Six shared seasons

Since we are our worst enemies, is it any surprise.that barbed wire, watchtowers and searchlights keep neighbours apart,.border guards suddenly slug it out for no apparent reason,.families picnic willy-nilly, as they wait in visa queues,. and poor people are rounded up – undesirables or aliens or both.. All the time the year keeps rolling to its celestial schedule:. grishma's furnace heat, barsha, monsoon floods, sarat's mellow skies,. hemant's fresh harvest, mist over the fields, dew underfoot,. warmth of embroidered quilts, winter bonfires, snow on mountains, fog on the plains,. then every girl a beauty in vasant's vibrant amber, & flowers with humid lips. kissing the passionate bee. Six seasons to everyone else's four – from the Himalaya. to Serendip, & the Indus plains to the delta of the Ganga & Brahmaputra –. hold the whole of Southasia together, six shared seasons. making nought of borders & barbed wire. Nature as usual, is. prodigal with gifts & lessons – & as usual, alas, we take one & ignore the other.. ~ Kaiser Haq is a poet, translator, essasyist and professor of Engish at Dhaka Univeristy, Bangladesh.