The Night Watchman Goes Home Poem by Arnab Das

All night it had rained
Filling up vacant lots and puddles
And the night watchman tired, lingers
In the horizon, as it furiously girdles
Round and round the squalid cityscape
In its last roll for the sake of scavenging
Subsistence. His doleful, hungry,
Sleepless eyes and stubby fingers
And his roughly made uniform drape
Flows in the wind as he cycles
Past the morning traffic and hurdles.

His cycle dips in the soggy potholes
And with a jerk and metallic clang,
And ringing bell past the shops that
Are opening now, making doughs
For mughlai dishes and egg rolls
And a lonely telephone that rang
With birds singing on the boughs
Mixed with a cacophony of the cars
That rushed past the treasury walls
Through the muddy city streets
And against the imperturbable face
Of the brown treasury wall on the wire
Two fallen kites surreptitiously hang.


The weatherman says it'll rain all day
For the climate is conducive for drizzles.
The air is dry and cold but in his opinion
There's a mild depression down the way.
The rain, albeit slight and scarce it sizzles,
The soul of earth turns green and gay.
The watchman on bicycle homeward,
Rides straight into scarlet sun's dominion
Where he mixes with crowd and no longer
To be distinguished, his watch comes to end
His bicycle bells lost in the noise of pinion.