In Transit

🚊

This piece moves in rhythm to the track and poem ‘Sleepers’, from my book and concept album Twenty Past Midnight.

“Another horn, another warning, a shaking before the dawning…”

Maybe trains were the first time I understood love.
Not the soft kind.
The kind that rocks you gently because stillness is worse.
The steel hum.
The clickety-clack.
The long dark tunnels.
The hush of strangers sleeping too close.

Maybe they were never just trains.
Maybe they were escape.
From locked doors and quiet tension.
From the kind of house that taught you to brace at footsteps. 
Maybe home was a chipped cup of weak tea, a cracked leather seat, a smelly ashtray, a stranger’s shoulder brushing yours, and no one asking where you were going.

What follows is a memory of the in-between.
The only place I truly belonged.
Before I even knew what belonging meant.

In Transit

Sometimes you don’t realise how much of your life has slipped out of reach
until you hear the sound of it again—
in a film,
a dream,
or a memory that knocks too hard.

For me, it’s trains.
Always the trains.
Not the sleek, high-speed trains of today,
but the ones that rattled,
groaned,
and carried you through a kind of silence
you can’t find anymore.

Trains were movement when I was stuck.
Freedom when I had none.
A slow, deliberate kind of freedom,
the kind that didn’t ask questions,
didn’t need explanations.

I could sit still
while the world slid past the window.
No voices calling my name.
No footsteps in cold hallways.
Just the rhythm of steel,
the hush between stops,
the soft rocking that held me
when nothing else did.

The cold glass against my forehead.
The seat worn thin by strangers.
The clatter becoming quiet.
The only time the noise in my mind
matched the sound outside.

I wasn’t going anywhere important.
But I was going.
And that was enough.

I learned to feel safe inside movement.
To find comfort in departure.
To belong in the in-between.

Not everyone understands that.
But the ones who do,
carry the sound in our bones
and still dream between stations.

I felt safer in those trains full of strangers
than I ever did in rooms that knew my name.

Waking in the early hours,
with someone new beside me,
and the wheels kept turning.
Turning without questions.
Turning without demands.
Just movement.
And cold glass
kissed by sunrise.

Those hours were mine.
The horn.
The frost.
The fields.
The hush.
That was safety.

I didn’t know it then—
but home was never a place.
Home was always in the in-between.

© Samira Wyld 2025

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Learn more about Twenty Past Midnight—click here.
And if you’re curious how the rhythm sounds when it slips beneath the skin—the official Sleepers video is below.

Thank you for reading another post from Music Is Poetry where we talk all things related to music, behind the scenes, sneak peeks into my songwriting, and composing process and more. You can find more about my music, and books by visiting my Official website.

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https://samirawyld.com

You can find out more about my illustrated poetry book ‘Twenty Past Midnight’ here and click here for beautiful songwriting and music notation books.