The Poetic Traveller

Two Poems written during my travels around South Asia

From a Train Window

When the more pedestrian of your worries are soothed
you realise with a start, the greater danger you never reckoned.

Just outside your cramped compartment,
past the rusty grille,
you can see, dissolving past,
overturned carriages freshly removed from the tracks.

This is where the accident happened,
besmirching a Constable landscape
with a mile of special bulletin footage.


At An Architecture School

The arched place
small
the people
creative
what studios hide behind those eaves

outspoken women at the meetings
dotted around classrooms
busy in elective collective work
taking black and white photos

just then Vikram passes judgment
on some
for the wrong manner of measuring a diagonal

on the walls of a shack
whirling tribal designs dance
again, a pattern
white on brown

the side where the meeting occurred
lifesize portraits of Jim Morrison look down
blue on white
Jethro Tull and John Lennon
dare only peek out of corners

the vandal graffiti of recent history
and a loose-feeling freedom