TRANSCRIPT

 I'm Myka Kielbon, and this is The Slowdown.

Sharing poetry is a two-way street. So today, you'll be hearing a poem selected by one of our listeners. Enjoy.

My name's Prerna Barooah, and I live in a small town called Jorhat in Assam in India. Trains are a very big part of the commute in India, even if it's not a daily commute. Especially when I was growing up, I would have to take the train to go visit my grandparents every six months.

I felt like I grew up on trains. And when I was away for college I didn't have to use the train. It's funny, we had a metro but I lived close to the college. But I loved going on the metro. Something about the liminal space of a metro, like, I knew the city better than my friends from the city because I spent so much time just going around on the trains.

Unlike an express train, which is a super fast train and only stops at really big stations, a local train stops very often. It's a short distance train, but it has a lot more life in it.

I think a lot of my imagination of traveling has to do with trains. There's this childhood poem I loved by an Indian poet. It's called “Father Returning Home.” It's by this bilingual poet called Dilip Chitre. It's another one of those things you read as a child and you don't really grasp completely, but it stays with you. It was about the journey of a father who works away from home all day and travels home by train. It just had so much pathos and weariness and it felt like I didn't really get it until I grew up, I think. Even though I loved the poem back then as well, now I kind of feel the energy of that poem, which is complete world weariness.

Because I'm freelancing currently, there's no set hours — it's up to me. So I live with my parents now again. My day mostly consists of running after my dogs and checking on the garden. I have a fairly big garden. Most of my daily updates consist of bougainvillea status, rain lily status, what's the status of this plant or that plant. And my dogs, essentially.

Today's poem takes me back to the timelessness of the pandemic. After reading this poem, I started my own little newsletter for my friends, which is named after this poem actually. And it's just updates about my garden, and about poetry that I've read every month, and music that I've listened to. Nothing in particular, it's a very meandering little email. I started it thinking if nothing else, if I have nothing else going in my life and I forget today from tomorrow, at least there'll be this particular day in the month that I will have to sit down and think, "So what did I do last month? What did I listen to? What did I read? What the hell happened to my plants?" And I'm still doing it. It's been six years. I can't believe I'm still writing it.

All Trains Are Going Local
by Timothy Liu

Slowing down your body enough to feel.

Thought you were at a standstill
but you were only slowing down enough

to feel the pain. There are worse things

than running to catch the train, twisting
your ankle, the afternoon fucked.

Running to get to or away from?

the stranger who helps you up
wants to know, you who are so used to

anything scribbled on a prescription blank.

Just want the pain to go away,  you say,
surprised to find yourself

reaching for someone else's hand.

"All Trains Are Going Local" by Timothy Liu from DON'T GO BACK TO SLEEP © 2014 by Timothy Liu. Used by permission of Saturnalia Books.

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