For now there’s only chopped onion frying with cumin for company
The oil sourced from a local miller reminds me of lamp oil
running out of which sleepless scholars in the mountains of ancient China read by the reflected radiance of snow
There is still time before I begin to melt but perhaps if I keep at it I’ll know something unnameable as intimately
as a pan knows soot and find the miller sitting by the scholars now reading aloud now looking up
to see if someone has put the wok on the stove for the new guest from across the Himalayas
Sarabjeet Garcha is a poet, editor, translator and publisher. His five books of poems include All We Have and Lullaby of the Ever-Returning, in addition to a volume each of poems translated from Marathi and prose from Hindi. He has translated several American poets into Hindi, including W.S. Merwin and John Haines, and several Indian poets into English. among them Mangalesh Dabral and Leeladhar Jagoori. His poems. translations and essays have been published in the Notre Dame Review, Versopolis, Lyrikline, Modern Poetry in Translation, Asymptote, Two Lines Journal, the Indian Quarterly, Scroll and the Wire, among other journals and several anthologies. He has received the Fellowship for Outstanding Artists from the Government of India, the International Publishing Fellowship from the British Council, and the inaugural Godyo Podyo Probondho Award. His poems have been translated into German, Spanish. Russian, Malayalam, Kannada, Marathi, Punjabi and Hindi. He is the founder and editorial director of Copper Coin (www.coppercoin.co.in). a multilingual publishing company based in Delhi NCR.