In The Train, Somewhere Near Gwalior

TIMBER 2018

Bibhu Padhi

Bibhu Padhi has published eleven books of poetry. His poems have appeared in distinguished magazines and anthologies throughout India, Switzerland, UK, USA and Canada.

Summer, and here the mind and body

are enclosed by a dim winter.

It isn’t as cold as I am given to feel.

Even the sounds of noon are excluded.

What you hear is something you

never wanted. Talk of loud profit and loss,

a woman’s voice protesting against

time’s necessities, the wheels

lazily turning on the rails. And now,

I am imprisoned in summer’s silence,

my feeling of being nowhere.

The nearest thing appears too, too far.

Only the slight sound of

an infant’s nestling against its mother

is all there is, and of course a whole

old world of unachievable sleep.