Tick … tock … tick … tock …
Can you hear the platform clock?
Crowds are queuing in the station,
Dreaming of their destination.
Bags and trunks and packs and cases,
Bound for umpteen different places!
Up the line the track is singing;
Silver rails are faintly ringing.
Through the meadows, vales and valleys,
Past the football stadiums and alleys;
Down the tunnels’ brick-lined throats,
Beside the harbour’s fishing boats;
Round the bend the Engine slows,
A snaking giant with a bullet nose!
Crossing borders, loch and sea,
This is the train that’s come for me!
Tick … tock … tick … tock …
I can hear the platform clock!
Andy Nuttall hails from East Lancashire, within hollering distance of the West Yorkshire birthplace of Laureates Ted Hughes and Simon Armitage. Andy’s children’s poems have appeared in The Dirigible Balloon (up, up and away!) and in Spellbinder Quarterly Literary Magazine. He has worked for twenty-five years in Social Care in the North-East of England. Andy has had grown-up stuff featured in Wave Six of Iambapoet Sound Platform (2021) curated by the poet Mark Antony Owen. Andy is currently working on a limerick sequence for his six week-old Grand-daughter. Follow him on Twitter @Arnutt7