I’m working on a book about my town’s railroad heritage and I’d like to have a poem in it about riding trains, trains themselves, working on the railroad, or just railroading in general. My favorite is Theodore Roethke’s "Night Journey, " which was seen here on this forum a few years ago. I used it in my first book, so I can’t use it again.
Do you have any suggestions?
By the way, I asked ChatGPT AI for suggestions and it offered me a number of such poems. But when it turned out that the one I liked best wasn’t written by the poet named as its author, I had a problem. It turns out that Chat GPT, when it doesn’t know the answer, simply makes something up.
So I just wonder if any of you gentlemen have suggestions or candidates for a good poem on trains, railroads, or railroading.
This is going to be a nice book. I’ve received permission to include five watercolors by Ted Rose and some other nice things. A fine poem would be a real plus.
There is Valery Larbaud’s Ode (to the Orient Express) from 1913.
It was translated into English by Louis Simpson and published in the Hudson Review:
Lend me your great noise, your great smooth speed,
Your nocturnal gliding across lighted Europe,
O train de luxe! and the agonizing music
That hums along your corridors of gilded leather,
While behind lacquered doors with latches of heavy copper
Sleep the millionaires.
I wander through your corridors singing
And I follow your course toward Vienna and Budapest,
Mingling my voice with your hundred thousand voices,
O Harmonika-Zug!
I felt for the first time all the sweetness of life
In a compartment of the Nord-Express between Wirballen and Pskov.
We were gliding by meadows where shepherds
At the foot of groups of great trees like hills
Were clothed in raw and dirty sheepskin…
(Eight o’clock on an autumn morning and the beautiful singer
With violet eyes was singing in the next compartment.)
And you, great squares across which I have seen
Siberia as it passed, and the hills of Samnium,
Harsh, unflowering Castile, and the sea of Marmara under a warm rain!
Lend me, O Orient Express, Sud-Brenner-Bahn, lend me
Your miraculous deep sounds and
Your vibrant voices like first strings;
Lend me the light and easy breathing
Of tall, slender locomotives with such unconstrained
Movements, the express locomotives
Effortlessly preceding four yellow coaches with gold lettering
In the mountainous solitudes of Serbia,
And, further away, crossing Bulgaria with all its roses…
Ah! these sounds and this movement
Must enter my poems and speak
For my life that has no speech, my life
Like a child’s that does not want to know anything, only
To hope eternally for uncertain things.
I’ve been going through some semi-recent threads looking for something I had posted. Seeing this thread again, and I don’t know why I didn’t think of it at the time it was new, but here goes.
“Uphill slow, downhill fast.
Tonnage first, horsepower last.
The rail is bad, the ties are worse.
What’s all this about Safety First.”
That ones has been around for years. Who knows, since maybe back when there was actual horse in horsepower. OK, maybe not that far back.
Shall I go, or shall I stay?
Go means more than a day away
More than a day away with my love
My love I love above
Above all my love I care
Care as I do more than I dare
Dare the journey such a long way
Shall I go, or shall I stay?
We met on a cold hill
One star pricked the cold cloud
Beyond the racing wind and a dead moon
In the background sang the cat –
Chilled-copper melodies and blue-flame scratches
We parted amid cold-marble columns
Light licking through smoke above the Solari board
and round us a roar of crowd,
Steam spinning us two blades with the rest --…
I lost you down to the platform, where sang the cat
Soft purrs of strength, coiled strength
We met last over the iron ocean,
On the concrete edge,
Behind us Philadelphia, cold cloud city,
Stormlight reaching thin fingers to light the flames of your hair
And touch below, where sang the cat
Biting litanies of fire
We parted, finally
On that cold hill
You silent, I standing over you
A racing wind blurring autumn trees
To great gouts of flame, twisting tears
From eyes yet shocked, a cold sun leaking
And in that evening, keening to a shriek
Sang the cat
Clawing to reach lost time, time forever lost.
The old defunct Railroad Magazine often printed many poems, most now lost to time.
One I remember was a parody of Longfellow’s Village Blacksmith. “Under a spreading semaphore, the village agent stands…”
That’s all I can remember. The issue I had it in was probably late 1960s/early 1970s and I’ve long since lost it. I collect them, because of the railroad fiction in most issues, but the older ones had a lot of technological info about the state of the art back then.
You should be careful when publishing other people’s work in your own book, as this can lead to copyright issues. If what you are creating is hyperlink text, you can include a YouTube video.
Japanese songs with railway themes probably date back to the 1980s. Next is a TV commercial song for the Shinkansen: Cinderella Express by Yamashita Tatsuro.
David, thank you for your poem. I appreciate all of the ideas and verses submitted. As for BN7150, I’m well aware of the copyright issues you warn of; I do have permission to use the poem I’ve chosen.
Thank you for correcting my work.
We learn haiku from elementary school, so it’s not that difficult. However, the best ones have a different sense of the season, rhythm, and the space they evoke. We need to keep our senses sharp in our daily lives.
