Sarabjeet Garcha

• Lamp​

<

>

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.

---

---