Liberty Lovett has lived in Galway city for ten years, having grown up in County Clare, but originally from England. She finds city life inspires her writing and she enjoys nothing more than sitting in a café with a notebook and pen and watching the happenings around her. Liberty wrote this poem after travelling through Eastern Europe.

 

Train Through Serbia

By Liberty Lovett

Hello people with cigarettes in your mouths.

Hello men with crutches, dislegged, disarmed by history.

Hello railway sleepers piled high and rotting in the rain, brown grass sprouting from gaps and creases.

Hello morning sun. You leave little in the shade, reflecting sharply on the window panes and into the dark eyes of unsmiling farmers.

My thoughts fleet mechanically, jumping to the clickedy clack of track touching wheel.

Hello rain cloud, grey like my Irish sky. You lie suspended darkening the eastern blue.

Hello town of concrete, scattered leaves and thin dogs lurking. Shadows distort your broken windows and the cracked pieces glare back at my passing face. The empty doorways in the grey house fronts appear to me like gaps in teeth of a laughing face.

Hello little one. Where is your mother on this cold night? Why is your face smiling when your feet are bare?

Hello children carrying stray kittens. They run to scatter pigeons that peck at stones and ants that I imagine are there but cannot see.

Hello to coffee on my tongue, chocolate biscuits melting, people’s voices and the creaking seats.

Hello numb legs and his sleeping weight against my body. His breath pushing into me and heartbeat timing mine and his thoughts slot into my mind and we are one and I am nobody.

And hello to the clickedy clack of words that fleet from the mouths of farmers whose eyes mist with cigarette smoke that rises from cracked window panes where dull lights creep out upon brown sprouting grass and dogs lying asleep upon the footprints of barefoot children whose laughing voices still echo in my mind as I weave in and out of myth, memory and noises.

Hello morning sunlight, sharp on my heavy eyes.