Train

Cold sweat trains down
the glass of my window.
As the iron horse stabs
through Indian rurality.
Its metal hooves roar across vast fields
of pastoral livelihood…

These visions stream through the filters
The Authorities have
So kindly provided as protection against
The dirt of the countryside.
Against the filth of Nature.
Unsophisticated earthiness is enjoyed only from afar.
Reserved for well off voyeurs.

…

And as the evening imperceptibly changes color.
Flows from a fluffy innocent white
to rebellious streaks of auburn red
to a pragmatic indigo, and finally
eases into an inky blackness.
Seems to metaphorise
the life cycle of man,
to my lazy postprandial imagination…

It holds no such magic
For the field-laborer
For whom night means but Rest
From the drudgery of the day.

He lives through 60 odd years (70 if his land reciprocates his affection)
Of these quotidian cycles.
Passes away ‘as silently as he lived.’
His life left to be inscribed
Into paeans sung to ‘poor and simple’ way of life
By poets and prose-ets who can afford
Leisurely contemplation.

There’s nothing heroic in struggling to make ends meet.
'Poverty is romanticized only by fools.'

…

I’m startled out of my reverie
by the excited scream of a child running through the aisles.
Her mind unbound by shackles
of self important anger and corroding cynicism…

And I wonder whether the powers
Of debate and argument aren’t such a curse.
How much more blessed
The irrational child is, than the rationalizing poet.

…

Clouded by dark thoughts
I brood.
And outside, the night envelopes the train.
Stars graze the dark sky.
And in the fading light of the somber dusk
I stare out gloomily at my pastoral landscape.
And realize with a start
that the window relinquished transparency a while back…

For the past several minutes,
I’d been staring
At me.

...

Ah, but for Life’s fleeting poignant moments
The self-respecting poet would go hungry.