Homesickness has a smell. For me, or for anyone who left, it is rain on hot tin roofs, or mustard oil in a kitchen two thousand miles away. Poems are the closest thing to bottling it.
The expat life runs on routine: work, sleep, remittance, repeat. Bengali poetry breaks the routine. One stanza and you are suddenly twelve years old, barefoot, with somewhere to be and nowhere to hurry.
The poems that hit hardest abroad are not always the famous ones. Often it is a simple village poem, a river poem, a monsoon poem. The fancy city poems stay in the city. The simple ones travel.
Many workers in Saudi Arabia and the UAE read on their phones late at night, after the room goes quiet. Data is precious, so short poems win. Bookmark the ones that feel like letters from home.
Share them with the people who get it. Your roommate from Barisal will understand a river poem in a way your coworkers never will. Poetry is also a way of finding your people.
Do not be embarrassed about crying at a poem. Nobody is watching, and even if they were, so what. The poem earned it.
There is a corner of kobitaghar.com for exactly this reader: poems about home, distance, and return, in clean text that loads fast even on slow connections.