07/08/2026
To everyone who holds the sprits of freedom
This Valley of Death Is My Country
This valley of death is my country. These fifty-six thousand square miles, these blood-soaked green plains, are my flag.
I will remain here. I will sit beside the mothers who have lost their children. Beside the epitaph-less graves of the unidentified. Beside the absence left by those who were disappeared. I will sit there holding a black-and-white photograph. And those who have no photograph—never had one, were never allowed to have one—those who are remembered only by a name, or not even that, those who have no one but Allah... must they too be forgotten?
This valley of death is my country. The sea lies on one side, barbed wire on the other three—where else can I go? I will float like a co**se upon the salty waters of the Bay of Bengal. I will hang like a dead body from bloodstained barbed wire. I will become a ghost, standing guard over every crematorium and every graveyard in this land. I will remain awake like a curfew-breaking moon above military convoys. I will stand at the edge of every march for freedom, offering myself as the target of every bullet fired by the murderers.
Yet this valley of death is my country. Whatever anyone has lost forever, whatever has been stolen from them, I shall become that loss and remain here. The clenched fist that refuses to bow before the tyrant, even while carrying a brother's co**se on its shoulder—that very hand harvests the golden crops of this land; that very hand keeps the machines of every factory turning. Let the history of the unborn future be written by those hands. I will gladly carry the burden of that history upon my shoulders.
Still, this valley of death is my country. Here, the boundary between life and death has vanished. The cold floor of the torture cell is my bed. From there, in the middle of the night, I will rise as an exposed, vulnerable life and run, crying desperately for a single bullet. My child will ask, "Father, why are you crying?" I will remain forever in the innocence of that child. The woman sitting beside her seized homeland, her face buried in her veil as she prays before God's court—she is my mother. I will become the quiet surrender within her prayer. I will become the imperfect prose poem of the poet who refused to forget those tormented by the longing for an immortality yet to come. I will become the public lecture that no one cared to hear, delivered by the intellectual who chose the streets over compromise with power, even at the cost of his own life. I will become the revolutionary spirit of the farmer who knows how to fight with a sickle, the worker who knows how to die for justice, the people who dig up killing fields and identify the torn remains of the dead.
Why should I not remain?
The sky is rumbling with storm clouds. This monsoon carries not sorrow or separation, but the winds of revolution. Upon every wall, the manifesto of the coming age is being written in letters of blood. Azrael himself kneels weeping before the march of liberation. Why should I not remain? Time itself has halted before a people born from the womb of death. The calendar has lost all meaning. Why should I not remain? The Padma, Meghna, and Jamuna now flow with the waters of a new tide. This July's Bangladesh has turned red like the dawn of creation. At the cold metallic touch of weapons, the soul returns to the clay as a new human being.
This valley of death is my country. This frozen calendar is my time. This vast killing field is the land I have cultivated all my life. This alluvial soil, salted by the sweat and blood of my forefathers, is the plain upon which I shall stand on the Day of Judgment. I will remain here. In this delta, I shall rise again and again.
For this valley of death is my country. These fifty-six thousand square miles, these blood-soaked green plains, are my eternal home. Here I shall live forever. Here I shall die—whatever death may come.
When I lie upon my deathbed, recite to me: "Long live the revolution."
And upon my epitaph, write in letters of blood:
"Motherland or Death."
May every revolutionary spring bring forth a single bright crimson wildflower
on the green grass that grows over my grave.
A poem by Tuhin Khan
#৩৬জুলাই #ফিরেদেখাজুলাই
