triveni spotlight A FEATURE EVERY ALTERNATE DAY! hosts: Teji Sethi and Kala Ramesh guest editor: Geethanjali Rajan
theme: listening
into the owl
a night train’s
whistle fading
Sandi Pray, USA
(A Hundred Gourds 4.3)
Note by the editor: The theme for June 2022 is ‘listening’. I hope you enjoy the music, sounds, and silences of nature in these showcased poems of close observation.
You are all too kind. And you probably realize by now I'm just a word drunk. Thanks (many thanks) to everyone making this sweet little art-world of ours spin!
This is an enriching poem!
The craft of the poem lies in its weight, sound, syllables count, usage of apt words pinpointing straight to that image without moving around or rather just leave it there. Lovely!!
I always wonder whether we can start a poem with, 'into' and here's a perfect example of that. Yes, unless we are clear as to what we want to say!!
Thanks Geetanjali! This month is really a bumper gift with the selection of your poems!
Sandi Pray gives us this beauty of a poem - listening to the fading sound of a night train.That whistle fading into the owl, that whistle fading into me. And then? The stillness, the silence - we bring that other half to this haiku!
The night train rumbling in my mind, the childhood trips to the village, the swaying rocking everyone to sleep and the whistle waking me up in the middle of the night... so many memories tied in there - again, the reader's doing with the poem.
I wonder where that train was going. As Billie says in the insightful comment - what a potent symbol! Was that owl still or flying... so many possibilities in this short…
into the owl
a night train’s
whistle fading
Sandi Pray, USA; (A Hundred Gourds 4.3)
A night train. Such a potent symbol for escape, maybe freedom, and certainly loneliness. And what a lonely whistle it is, echoing though this evocative poem.
The Doppler fade of the sound itself reminds us of our transience—how quickly we, too, shall fade within the span of this life’s journey; and how swiftly, reflexively our emotions wax with each and every perception. Whether we are consciously aware or not, our bodies gather in these ambient sounds. They weld us into the signaled matrix of the physical universe.
For me, the whistle fading into the owl is the brilliant move in this poem. The bir…