Slow Train To Ikeda

Below is this year’s Grade 11 winner of the Serup Poetry Competition. I am on a slow train to Ikeda — a town in western Japan where you lived as a baby when you had curly chestnut hair.   I met you years ago when I lived in a world of white houses with white fences fish and chips on grass pumpkin spiced scones and my father’s grey eyes the kind of eyes that I never had.   My father left me before I could spell but I grew up writing poems about him, each word paying for each strand of chromosome he had left at my doorstep.   But he is not here, I'm on a slow train to Ikeda the seats in this train are spinach green. Outside, people are cooking rice in their miniature houses steam rising up chimneys, tinting the clouds hues of orange cracking up a little entrance to heaven   It's a quiet town all the sounds in the world drained from the underground pipes. People living monotonous lives washing the rice, once, twice, three times   As I sit here, on a seat as green as traffic lights I try to hear your voice and feel the soft fuzz of your hair. The present feels so alive the tangibility of it might leak and flood the carriages of this train.   If you were here right now you would ask me, "Do you still write?" I would say, "No." "Why?" "The new criteria is too hard. I don't tick those boxes anymore." You would then say something along the lines of "You tick 'em boxes that others don't."   But you are not here, I am on a slow train to Ikeda. Out of all these blue-roofed houses, which one did you live in? Your Norwegian mother, who moved here with your Japanese father: did she miss the opposite shore of the Pacific?   Maybe you too, are on a slow train to Ikeda one that departed three minutes before mine   Maybe my father is waiting at the terminal station. He couldn't find me all these years because he was cursed — stuck in a loop of time. Standing with the rice-cooking villagers, on the bleaker end of love, he waves at me his hair looking as grey as his eyes. Grace L, Allard ‘19