Adlestrop, read out loud
My first post here was about Adlestrop: Edward Thomas's poem about an express train that stopped, unexpectedly, at a country station one hot afternoon in late June, and nobody got off. He never got off. He just remembered the name.
The station closed in 1966 and the building is gone. Someone saved the sign and the bench; they sit in the village bus shelter now. The place behind the poem doesn't exist anymore, and the poem still works.
So I read it out loud. Thirty-five seconds, my own voice, nothing else:
Thomas wrote it in 1915 and died in the war two years later. He didn't know any of that when he wrote it. He just noticed the steam, a blackbird, someone clearing his throat, and let it open out into two counties of birds.
If you want something read aloud – your own words, or a poem that fits an occasion – that's what I do. [email protected]