Listening to Arlo play his railroad stories
why is the 60’s, 70’s
American country music
so often
on the road,
forever talking
light rides
hitchhiking
across the land?
they sing
with an eye on
bus-stops cold
with horizons
slung between
the dream
and the sun
neon signs
for roadside inns
and dust flying full
everywhere
Mississippi Texas
Tennessee
they write
always between
two mornings
of disappearing
railroad blues
or till the next ride down to
the San Francisco lights.
the minute
you heard them,
they were already
shuffling down
a (third) beer in hand
to some
odd galaxy of city-streets
all they wept for
will float beneath
the young night-sky
of their America.
Sthira Bhattacharya is an undergraduate student of English Literature in St. Stephen’s College, Delhi. Much of her writing traces lines across the three cities she has known in bits – Delhi, Kolkata and her hometown Dhanbad in Eastern India.