A train ticket and a (kid-friendly) poem in your pocket

April 29 is Poem in Your Pocket Day (2022). If you’re a parent or teacher looking for poems to share with kids, haiku is the perfect pocket poem –tiny, quick to read, and easy to jot down on a small scrap piece of paper.  Last Train Home is a collection of train-inspired haiku from around the world (edited by me and available through Amazon). The book is aimed at adults, but includes many examples of poems that will inspire kids and teens. A sampling:

bullet train for Tokyo

too fast to finish

my box lunch

– Emiko Miyashita, Japan

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thinning crowds

the station mouse obeys

the Keep Left sign

– David Jacobs, United Kingdom

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on the Jacobite

twenty-one arches near Glenfinnan

crossing worlds

– susan spooner, Canada

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[Note: in the Harry Potter movies, the train to Hogwarts crosses the Glenfinnan Viaduct in north-west Scotland]

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evening star

a child echoes every call

of the train vendors

– Ramesh Anand, India

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night train

an open boxcar

filled with stars

– Ron C. Moss, Australia

*

 

 

Sharing a train window

I’m thrilled to announce the launch of Last Train Home, a new collection of haiku, tanka, and rengay celebrating train travel! The book is edited by me, with contributions from poets around the world.

Over the past year, many of us have had to cancel trips and stay close to home. But there are no limits to where our imaginations can take us. Last Train Home is an invitation to remember past trips, and imagine the sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and emotions others have experienced crossing the Canadian prairies or the Australian Outback, climbing China’s Yellow Mountain, travelling at night between Paris and Madrid, glimpsing Mount Fuji, stopping at border crossings, and so much more. It also looks forward to when we can once again travel freely, get together with family and friends, meet new people, and explore new places.

In the meantime, I’d like to welcome you on a virtual train tour, beginning with a photo of sunrise from Saskatoon station on my first cross-Canada VIA Rail trip back in the mid-1980s. The haiku that follows speaks to more recent experience on the same train—sharing a dining table with different passengers each day.

sunrise

across the dining car

an exchange of hometowns


Jacquie Pearce

And a few more selections from the book:


Paris to Milan train

the baby cries

in every language


Karen Hoy



departing Valencia

as my vacation ends

scent of oranges


Roberta Beach Jacobson



dark night

a migrant catching sleep

on the last train


Adjei Agyei-Baah

Last Train Home is available on Amazon in various countries. You can also drop into the Last Train Home -haiku Facebook page for more poems, photos, and stories related to the book and train travel in general.

To keep the virtual train going, I’m inviting other creative writing bloggers to share their train stories and photos and link back here.

Next stops on the tour:

kcdyer, Vancouver-based author of the literary travel adventure, Eighty Days to Elsewhere

Poet Julie Thorndyke from New South Wales, Australia

Haiku Railroad Blues video with US haiku poet Alan Pizzarelli

Crafty Green Poet, Juliet Wilson, writing from Edinburgh, Scotland

a past train post by UK poet Alan Summers and a new post about the train anthology.

Haiku poet Agnes Eva Savich shares some of her train haiku and images from her 1998 European train travels

Choo choo ku is on the way

Sorry, I couldn’t resist! Last Train Home, the anthology of train haiku, tanka, and rengay, which I’ve been working on for close to three years (as editor) is almost ready! Will be launching the book with a virtual train tour starting here next week.

(waiting for a late train at the Brockville Station in Ontario, shortly before I boarded VIA Rail’s Canadian to travel from Toronto to Vancouver back in Sept 2015)

Call for train haiku . . .

I’ve always loved trains (the lonely call of a whistle in the night, the view of passing landscape from a train seat, the rocking rattle of an overnight berth, conversations with strangers in the dining car…), and have been thinking for some time about putting together an anthology of haiku about trains. Well, the project is finally getting on track.

You are invited to submit haiku, tanka, rengay, and haibun with a train theme (including experiences and imagery related to steam trains, bullet trains, cross-country journeys, commuter trains, freight trains, the passing landscape, human interaction on trains, internal journeys, etc).

Please submit:

– up to 20 haiku

– up to 5 tanka

– up to 3 rengay

– up to 3 haibun

Unpublished and previously published work will be considered. Please include submissions in the body of the email, and provide previous publication credits, as well as your name, email and postal address. Please put “train anthology submission” and your name in the subject line of your email.

Deadline for submissions: June 30, 2018 [Submissions now closed. Info on upcoming book will be posted in spring/summer 2020]

If you’re coming to this blog for the first time and would like more information about who I am, I write haiku and other poetry, short non-fiction, and novels for children (my website: jacquelinepearce.ca). My haiku, tanka and haibun have been published in a variety of journals and anthologies, and two of my haiku recently co-won the League of Canadian Poets inaugural haiku contest. I also co-edited The Jade Pond, a collection of haiku by the Vancouver Haiku Group published earlier this year, and I’m a co-judge for the 2018 Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival Haiku Invitational.

You can read something about my family’s train legacy here.