ON THE MORNING TRAIN

Aug 07, 2023 Letters

Dear Editor,

Kaieteur News – A time when we waited and waited for the morning train.

We talked and laughed and kept a lookout for those bright eyes as the train winded its way along green fields of rice.

Seemed like an ungainly thing—tons of steel and iron—but ran like a winged stallion that lightly touched earth and sand.

All that burly metal tamed when the station master waved the flag; the train stopped, and out came big blocks of ice that the portly man at the shop carried on his back.

A fair exchange when station master and conductor traded flags, and the train moved as the rails cringed along pebbled-laden tracks.

The familiar clipping of tickets before we had time to take a seat. School girls giggled and chatted and told secrets that were never kept. Boys talked of the match at Bourda as the train rattled along the tracks.

There were arguments and a fight or two, but the train never detained, and many kept their time on the sound of the morning train.

We saw cane fields, canals and trenches, farmlands, and grassy plains where cows and horses roamed, and crows tore into a donkey’s entrails.

We saw pink lilies as they swayed in the morning breeze, and jamun trees and bamboos, moco-moco bush and nests of killer bees —all for a ticket to a trip on the morning train.

Now there’s no sound of the morning or the late-night train, but the mad rumbling of minibuses and loud noises from boom boxes.

There’s no time to listen to a fellow traveller breaking into a song.

But folks still talk of fun along those rails long levelled and gone, and the conductors who clipped the tickets on the morning train.

Regards
Haimnauth Cecil Ramkirath

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Moco Moco, pebbled-laden tracks, traded flags, traveller

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