The following poem by Lakshya Singh from Nalagarh, Himachal Pradesh was selected as a commendable mention in Wingword Poetry Prize 2020
It doesn’t matter if the engine,
sneakily crawls,
or bolts like that cold-sandwiched air
blowing past,
those weary faces,
dispersed on dull green, metallic benches
when you are lying still,
a dormant volcano,
lips shunned , eyes-shut
away from the sight of that glass window,
on that upper berth 64-B1,
which smells,
rather fumes of someone familiar,
of white-linen soaked in fingertips,
vaporizing beneath that
strangely cold, grey blanket
coiled like the hair of that lady
drifting in her late sixties,
supping her tea in a plastic cup,
glancing at the glass window
which stares back at her like
a cracked mirror.
With her back hunched as
a crumpled sheet of paper,
her name, age and a thousand other letters
carved on her round face,
the ticket collector stares
at the blurriness of her eyes:
a perfect identity card,
passes a faint, nearly invisible smile
and then moves away,
near a couple with an
over-zealous toddler sucking
the nipple of his milk bottle,
and babbling occasional “Amma, Appu”,
which fades away in the bustle of the tires,
his mother, dressed in her khaki-kurta
probably watching dunes fall back
into little grains of sand on her cheeks,
his dad, pretending to read a book,
while rubbing his son`s back.
Upon his arrival,
they sit befuddled
as an unhinged door,
she vigorously searches her handbag,
he lays hands on his narrow pockets,
nothing, mere lumps of rock
tanked like an empty silo ,
outside their window,
inside their throats.
They unzip their luggage ,
bags shut open like their mute mouths,
clothes heaped over -another
like buried, unspoken words
“It will be fine,
we`ll be fine,
you`ll be just be a video-call,
just a few semesters,
probably then a 9-5 job away.”
They check over his little pockets,
the little fingers, those curly hairs,
the bottled milk, nothing.
mere ghost spaces
and bones intertwined into one.
The TTE mumbles and moves away
with a slight hand gesture,
rather a sympathetic nod
read as” Its okay, I understand, anyways.”
It doesn’t matter if the engine
whistles or
silently drags itself with
a thousand bodies floating
through time and space,
when those fluorescent lights are already shut,
the pastel blue curtains drawn and
that bottled milk spilt on the floor.