Hands Down

Train travel evoked memories of our days at the brook:
We created bubbles on those warm spring mornings
The soap was green, the scent, alluring
And so too were the grass tufts growing close
To patches of pastures that would roll past

It tickled our feet like the section that coupled carriages
First rung of the escalator, we wanted to go up
Crossing that part with caution, from one ‘economy class’ section
To another, paying visits to relatives and newly-made acquaintances
Whose return tickets to their place of nonentity
Would later come in handy

Once we hit the Main Station, sometimes
We would simply loiter, in the corridors of the system
Catch whiffs twirling from the diner, get close to the ‘whites only’ section
It would stare down at our offensive noses
Long and hard, I, yet to decipher the ABC
Saw simplicity, or was there?

We were young, everything hilarious and ludicrous
Couplers could grind like a crocodile’s teeth, so they said
We attempted to cover ours, exposed in mirth
With lathered palms clenched into fists, we raised them
“Power!” blew the bitterness, foaming it in handfuls

Their launch would take our breaths away
Faces lifted to follow as they sauntered
Into the future, rocking from side to side
Gut-deep, an up-down motion of one on a swing
Those train rides were purely magical,
Moved us from our stations on the banks.

Bath time was an extended affair
Mother doused us in sun-heated water
Rubbed our tender backs with a soft sand loofah
We were clean enough for our dry ‘wash and wear’
We were tortoises going about, our wardrobes tacked on us,
Sometimes we would bow and
Watch the little rainbows wrapped in clear balloons
Drift to their deaths on tips of dense foliage that stood guard
So that our mirror could carry on its rambling ways
Over flyovers, burrowing through underbridges

Across nude rivers, same-sex bathers would wave
Hoping they were us, but they weren’t, or were they?
That distinct smell of the steam locomotive
Would chase the setting sun, a tad elongation of daylight
Wafting in through rolled down windows

It’s a stream now, the old fig tree sits in the backwater
A stump gone grey, its bark-lessness, a bald dictator
Plant residue around here complains about being trodden
Goats move in to ascertain the entirety of the harvest
The bough that’s long dead, stands in the dark water of the elbow
extending a spectre’s hand from across the stream.

Sounds of the trains and the smell of laundry are in the past now
Soap is barred, too eco-unfriendly, the system derailed
Kids will remember the flow, alongside cultivated banks
Ready-made chemicals from shops smelling Chinese
How they blew into the stuff to create ephemeral globules.