A Train Ride Home

I look back on my life,
trying to find the splice
between child and adult,
and find it
on a train ride home.

I’m not long off the Oostende ferry,
all set for a week in London;
I have a poem half-done,
balanced on my knees.

From the open window, a sharp breeze
threatens to blow it away;
I tuck my notebook under my arm,
wait for the breeze to calm
before I turn the crumpled page
and write it all down:

the changing season,
sheep, cows and rainbows,
and the clickety-clack of the train
racing through grey cloud and rain,
towards the sooty suburbs,
bringing me home again.

Kim M. Russell, 18th June 2024

Image by Alisa Anton on Unsplash

This week’s dVerse Poets Pub Tuesday Poetics is hosted by Punam, who asks us to write a poems about our experiences of travelling by train.

She tells us about her own experience of a thirty-six hour steam train journey across India, every summer vacation, to visit relations. I love the way she describes the trip in a packed second class carriage, complete with food, bedding and luggage, as fun: ‘meeting strangers, sharing food, reading books, clambering up and down the berths and most of all enjoying the changing scenery every few hours, never mind the grit hurting our eyes!’

Punam says that train travel has changed, with ‘swanky electric trains are faster, cleaner and still cheaper than flying’, as well as being a transition space taking us from point A to point B. She refers to movies in which trains are used to convey the transition a character is going through; ‘people have been known to unburden their secrets to strangers, fall in love or renew ties with their own family.’

She says that even if we don’t believe in the romance of trains, we all have a memory of a journey that still makes us smile.

Also shared on What’s Going On? for Mary’s prompt on 13th November 2024.

62 thoughts on “A Train Ride Home”

  1. I love the adventure of going to a new place but I must admit that there is nothing as comforting as going home. Love the perspective of the changing season in your last stanza.

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  20. Very interesting to contemplate, Kim, to contemplate the space between being a child and being adult. It seems YOU found it on the train ride home. As I reflect for myself, it seems to me when I was away from home after college, I was an adult…..until I went back home and then, in some ways, enjoyed being my parents’ child again for a few days.

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  23. “find it
    on a train ride home.”

    That’s the kind of journey that connects the segments of my life as well. Mine is also by train with a notebook on my lap . . . but to recognize the journey as a “splice” takes another level of awareness. Mighty fine poem.

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