"The Signalman’s Son"

The following is a poem written by Canadian writer Jaspreet Singh and shared with The Banff Centre. Singh is a frequent participant in The Banff Centre’s self-directed writing residency program and has conducted numerous residencies in The Banff Centre’s Leighton Artists' Colony.

Yesterday at the Leighton Studio

in Banff someone revived

a long dead poet who grew up listening

to an Olivetti (Father: Journalist)

And I thought I grew

to the sounds of Morse

code, la de da radio sets

ghostly self-typing Telex machines

Some two continents away now

My ears brim over  

do-dah did-did-it

Alpha Bravo Charlie Romeo OVER

Kilo Delta OVER. Not the line of sight flag

signals they were. More like invisible

waves to the child’s imagination. A game

of vanishing distances invented by gods

before I was born. Sufficiently enlarged  

now in my hands my father’s black-and-white

wedding photo. He is on a

two-and-a-half day leave from his regiment

Wide-eyed in civilian dress. A long sash  

of reddened muslin forms a bridge

Knots him to my mother. Together they

circle the First Book, the Adi Granth

Both wear garlands of rose, marigold. In his

hand the bridegroom’s symbolic sword. But

already it has become a word

an orderly combination of dots

and dashes. For him receiving and transmitting

signals through a mountain

terrain was like

tapping into the collective unconscious

of armies and their soldiers. On this side

and that. High, ultra-high

and very-high frequencies

of trust and betrayal

Right after the wedding

he returned to the remote post near the border

One of the two in the platoon who masterfully

deciphered enigmas, plucking meaning out of air

Wonder what palimpsest messages he sent

back home to my mother

in the city of Partition survivors. And how

she managed to un-code them

during dusks and dawn. Today from the Leighton Studio

on ‘Sleeping Buffalo’ I saw the remains of a wild-

fire shaped like an ever widening ring. A tangent line

of a mountain the natives used to call the ‘Cloud Maker’

Only a few memories survive

of that un-born time. A superposition

of trillion crackling frequencies

Sometimes I don’t hear a damn thing