The Tiger

the train stops — some mechanical fault — and through the glass of the passenger car, I see her: a great Bengal beast, powerful and menacing, moving slow beyond the window.

and I close my eyes.

and it could have been the swelter of a harsh Indian summer, Calcutta due north on the Express out of Delhi, smoke jettisoning from the stack into blue, steam venting into the foliage, into a jungle of sorts.

perspiration snaking like a river through three days of travelling hair, men grumbling, their split cane walking sticks hammering into the pine carriage floor, agitation on every face, children crying, the women agonising over the jungle beyond the glass, struggling to stay dry through four layers of Indian cotton.

the great beast stalking the treeline,
sovereign in the heat,
a hundred years and half a world away.

but it wasn’t.

I open my eyes, she moves the same — stalking, her great belly brushing through the grass — but the grass is strewn with rubber toys and old Chevy tyres, and the heat is a light dusting of snow, and she is a rare sighting for commuters stranded outside the Cambridge Wildlife Park at feeding time, in the throes of a hard mid-winter.

the same gold eyes,
a hundred years, half a world—
now, the snow, the glass.