Faruk Ahmed Roni

The veil of Mithila is not spun from silk
It is wrapped in the hush of cannon-swept ash,
Tinged with the hush-grey hue of a weary sky,
Woven with the gossamer of time’s forgetting.
It rests upon her face,
Yet never dims the light in her gaze.
Through its quiet folds, she sees
A world scorched and stumbling,
Bruised by powers that burn without end.

Mithila crosses the fields in the heat of the fire,
The blood-soaked grass of the dawn
clings to her feet,
Amazement in her eyes!
Her veil stitched with the silent
labour of centuries
She was never meant to hide her beauty,
Nor to shelter glances seeking purity.
It is a mirror,
Softly holding the weight of human
longing and loss.
And so she sees, gently but clearly,
The ache in empty hands,
The quiet division of a shared crust of bread.

Within the veil, her eyes,
bright as a restless flame
Do not seek kings or battles crowned in gold.
They rest upon ruins cradled by labour,
Upon mothers, moving
with memory in empty arms,
Chasing promises softened by distance.
This veil flows like a stream of salted rain,
It touches the warm dust beneath
displaced feet,
Breathes with the lungs of the working poor,
And carries stories once folded
In the careful creases of a grandmother’s hands.

Beneath it,
Mithila is no seeker of omens
She watches with quiet knowing,
A world where prayers often rise
Not from reverence, but need.
She counts children
Whose bellies hold only wind, not bread.
Her veil does not hide her
It shields her strength,
A gentle filter through which truth still shines.
She gathers what we leave unspoken,
The names we dare not give to sorrow.

And when she lifts the veil,
The world does not recoil
It remembers. not in fear,
But in recognition.
For what she reveals is not distant
It is what we have hidden
Beneath the silence of our own tongues.