The Uncommercial Traveller (1860 - 2025)

Looking down on the clouds

We fly as slow as mist

Down jungle-deep mountains

Endless tea plantations

Ravines and rivers

Crossed by old iron bridges

Water tumbles down

Cliff faces to wash the banks

Of rivers running

Through countless little towns

On the train from Ella

From Kinigama

From Ohiya

Past the road of the 
World’s End

All the way down

To Kandy.

_

At the Majestic Tourist Hotel

Joseph is full of stories

Kumari is full of advice

And Cat (whose name is only Cat)

Is full of kittens yet to murmur

Their first purr

And I wonder if the owners

Are fans of 
Breakfast At Tiffany’s.


There is a strange old

Romance about them,

Like the dim-purple lake reflecting the

Final light of the jungle's

Sunset.

_

On the roof of the hotel

Watching westerling sun streaming

Through cascading jungle down

Steep mountains that pour

Little houses dotted here and there

Down into Kandy’s valleys

And I

Telegram little work notes

Zoom through teleconferences

My mind already ahead an hour or two

Or behind a century or two

Lost in stories to be read at dusk of

Charitably violent goblins and

Uncharitably saved sextons and

Visits to Newgate and

Meditations in Monmouth Street and


A flight via train to Paris.

_

A collection of stories travelled far

From the desk of Dickens

Long ago


Half a world away

And words from a century and a half away

Ring as true today

As Dickens describes looking out the window

From London to Switzerland in the life

Of the Uncommercial Traveller.

_

On a second hand bookshelf

Half a world away

These word were found:

_

Looking out the window

In that delicious travellers’ trance

Which knows no cares,

No yesterdays,

No tomorrows,

Nothing but the passing objects,

The passing scents and sounds.