When I Hear the Whistle of a Passing Train

Uncut Poetry

The passing of a speeding train. It’s whistle from afar. The smoke from the now-disappearing steam engines. The rapidly decreasing chug-chug as it leaves a railway station. These sounds and images are sepia-tinted in my memory, fraying at the ends with passing time. But making me remember - what a time that was. And I drown so heavily in the past, that I wallow and I wonder - is nostalgia a benediction or a curse? Writers extol me - don’t drown in that lake, or your words would forever be cursed by mush and sentimentality. My heart says - linger, a little longer, before climbing the mountain of today. When has a poet ever listened to his head? I fallow. I sometimes think the wonder which filled our Iives in our childhood had more stars than the skies - the innocence of growing up allowed anything and everything to fill its illimitable space. And as time passed by, the skies drowned in the depth of minutiae’s ocean. Till memories surfaced like flotsam when an ancient breeze came by to ripple the water’s surface. And we asked ourselves “whither?” Life’s trajectories always seem to take us away. Away from what we love, away from what we cared, away from things which made us the persons we were, away from what we now call ‘our roots’. But by then we are far gone, foregone. We are the rubber band which has been pulled beyond shape. And we look back, stretched and irredeemable, with yearning and regret. I now know what the writers meant - and what they missed. Nostalgia is a country for the tired soul. Its revisitation is not a weakness, because it is primarily a resting place. It is to do with standing at one’s own window, letting either the winter sun in or the falling dusk, and remember what it all meant, at a time when we were not in search of meaning at all. And how those times mean the world to us now. If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems steeped in nostalgia -

• Those Days of a Lost Summer
• Lost Atlas of Belonging
• One Summer

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Subscribe to my incandescent and poetic newsletter The Uncuts here - https://theuncuts.substack.com. The details of the music used in this episode are as follows -

Music: The Train in the Darkness by MusicLFiles
Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/7240-the-train-in-the-darkness
License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Artist website: https://cemmusicproject.wixsite.com/musiclibraryfiles

Music: Autumn Dusk by chilledmusic
Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/9843-autumn-dusk
License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license