Shah Wasif

Dhaka Never Sleeps

I come from a city that never learned the grammar of silence.

Not the sleeplessness of those who chase,

not the burning lamp of ambition

that mistakes exhaustion for purpose.

Something older.

Something that hums beneath the stone

like a river that has forgotten

it was ever anything but this.

At 2 AM the rickshaw bells still sing

their small unremarkable songs

into the thick and breathing dark,

and the vendors argue prices

for things no one needs at 2 AM

but someone, always, wants,

because wanting is the one thing

twenty million souls

have never had to learn.

The rain comes down on concrete and marigold and exhaust

and becomes, somehow, one smell,

one memory,

one country

compressed into a single breath

that I have been exhaling

ever since I left.

I live now in a place where nights go silent

the way pages go blank

before the poem arrives.

I did not know a city could stop speaking.

I sat in that silence

like a man who has walked into a temple

and cannot remember the prayer

but knows, still,

that he belongs here,

kneeling.

Home is not always the place

that holds you gently.

Sometimes it is the place

that shaped you in the fire,

that asked everything

before you had anything to give,

that taught you

how to carry noise

like a kind of love

you do not put down

even when your arms are tired.

Dhaka never sleeps.

And so I carry her with me

into every silent room,

every quiet country,

every midnight

that does not know

how to be loud enough

to feel like home.

I close my eyes.

She is still there.