Ndrek Gjini’s “The Train of My Life” takes one of the oldest metaphors—life as a journey—and runs it on rails, so that the speaker is less a traveller than a passenger carried along. The opening precision sounds like a birth certificate: “8:32pm on 1st October, 1963,” from “a maternity hospital / in a small town in North Albania.” Immediately, the train metaphor is laid over a real human beginning, and the poem then follows a life through its scheduled stops: creche, school, workplaces, foreign cities, a rainy island, and finally an unmapped graveyard.
The central idea is not that life is an adventure but that much of it is fixed, and that the journey is carrying us toward death while our choices are smaller than we like to imagine. At first the stops feel intimate and alive: “cries, / toys, / ink spilt on shirts and trousers, / a broken pencil.” The short line “toys,” sits alone like an object glimpsed from a window. Then childhood and school are compressed into a breathless list: “copies, fights, loves, hates, mistakes, / first kisses, white dust from the chalk, / lost shoes on football pitches.” The concrete details do the work of memory—each one specific, yet brushed past quickly, exactly as the years themselves seem to rush.
The tone hardens when the train reaches adult work. There, “the head was not needed at all, just the arms, / because the bosses were the ones / who were always right.” The phrase “who were always right” has a flat, bitter edge, while the body reduced to “just the arms” captures a life used for labour rather than thought. The speaker is not choosing these stops; he is being unloaded at them. The poem’s form reinforces that feeling. It is free verse, without rhyme, and the line lengths contract and expand unpredictably, like a train’s rhythm over points. Repeated verbs—departed, stopped, stopped, passed, will move—keep returning to the same track. Yet the movement is undeniably forward, from “departed” in the first line to “arrive” in the final stanza, and there is no return journey.
Travel, which might seem like freedom, becomes another form of isolation. The train passes through “many strange countries and cities,” but the speaker is “regretful, unable to enjoy / the thrills and luxury that those places held.” The word “held” suggests gifts offered but not taken. Then comes a “long stop on a rainy island,” where “everything—feelings, memories, the body— / began to rust away beneath an endless rainfall.” The word “rust” is the poem’s most important transformation: a train should move, but moisture and inactivity attack it. The rain is endless, and the body is listed alongside feelings and memories, all corroding together, so that depression or displacement becomes not an event but a climate.
What makes the poem significant is how honestly it undercuts the glamour of the journey metaphor. A train may sound romantic—departures, new cities—but here the tracks are chosen by someone else, the passenger cannot get off, and the timetable ends in a graveyard “on an uncertain day of an uncertain month / during the 21st century.” Even the word “scheduled” carries a dark absurdity: there is a schedule, but nobody can read it. The closing hope is not for adventure but for delay: “I hope not soon.” That small, plain sentence lands heavily, because after all the earlier movement, the speaker’s only remaining wish is that the train not reach its final stop. The poem clears away the usual consolations and leaves a truth that feels especially pointed for school readers: we do not choose our first station, and we do not know our last one.