Letter to Trans-human Descendent

Mohammad Zaman

May 2020

Poetry

English

First Day of Bengali New Year under the Shroud of Covid-19

Cherry is fugacious and wither; and spring is nothing
But achromatic moment in a cosmic dance; a living planet

Dancing around its star; and a blip in time’s eternity.
Man is bound by a life, fleeting and destined.

“That they are transient,
that they are contingent,
that they suffer.”

Ineffable it may seem, but a kerfuffle is what we have;
It is to sort out a meaning out of nothingness and nonsense;

Oeuvre and weighty tome of the human are transcendent;
And yet the flesh of dust is destined to die and reincarnate,

As a grain of hue in the wings of a butterfly, or in the
blossom of a momentary cherry; such is the opus!

Not to bemoan, but today is the beginning of a new year;
maidens in yellow raiment, and youths of awkward age;

and the singing and the dancing under the shade of an
age-old banyan – patinas of time engraved in the richness

of innards.

Innards are out and the arena empty; is it this tiny strand
of a deathly virus, or something more that gnaws at the

core?

(An empty celebration of Bengali New Year – on 04/14/2020)

Letter to Trans-human Descendent

Does it still rain in your world; does the bird sing; does the ocean still roars with wind; does man still makes love with his beloved; are you a cyborg; a mind-uploading interface with a machine;
does Moore’s law still applies or you are transcendent; have you conquered death and thus erased the philosophy of the living; have you travelled to the jeweled ceiling; past Cassiopeia; past Pleiades; into the galaxies at the edges of this unending universe; have you met the Star Maker?

Have you listened to the cosmos that is made of music alone; and it has no spatial dimension? If you do, please, send me a note…

Have you mastered the Dyson Sphere; do you still have your navel connected to this “mote of dust floating in a sunbeam” – this earth, a fleeting abode of a billion bipeds; precarious and in constant flux; glaciers melting, oceans rising, feet burning, apocalypse dark and forthcoming;
we the sapiens in a path towards a topsy-turvy cosmic collision; inevitable; and sure footed;
we cringe in deathly aghast; a total angst of existential disintegration.

My dear great, great grandchild, today is 20th day of the fourth months of the year 2020; for fifty years we celebrate this day in praise of mother earth; do we?

Do you still count your hours and days, the way we count? Have you known what we never knew; have you seen what we never saw?

Or maybe, you don’t exist; maybe we have, or our children have self-annihilated; and the earth rendered wasteland; blighted; and your very existence is killed before you are born.

No more I dream of butterflies or of peacock dancing; things that matter does not matter
anymore. A pervasive anxiety has set in. I have lost my sleep while airplanes crisscross the sky with plumes of toxic gas.

(April 20, 2020, 50th Anniversary of Earth Day)