The Whistle Of That Train Poem by Shamik Kumar Bose

The Whistle of that Train was terrific
Two lines of a track never converge
Yet it looks like from a distance
Like that the Whistle used to put me inside a surreal dream
My home a few hundred yards away from the railway lines
Inside a sleepy small town underneath Himalayas
I often used to hear the sound of that whistle twice a day
Upwards to Calcutta, downwards to Haldibari as the Coal Engine dragged the body everyday
Never failed
Like the diurnal motion
The setting of the Sun
The rise again
The Moon sometime eclipses
So the Sun
The Train never failed
That sound
Can't say
Have you ever felt a flute?
Yes it is not love
It is not even fear
But an immense mountain of astonishment used to sit on my mind
I loved to roam about the last echo of that sound
Until it whisked away inside the dark clouds
Then rain used to come
And I used to drench until
I could hear the same sound again.

april 2010