Thursday Poem: Subway Muezzin

TNG reader Mike B. submits this poem, the third in a Thursday series. Illustration by Ryan Blomberg.

I wrote this during the short time I lived in New York and took the Q train back and forth to work. New York subways are so huge that they have a separate driver and conductor, and the conductor on one particular train had a Middle Eastern-sounding accent so thick that no one could understand the station stops he was announcing.

We were mostly the commuter crowd, so we already knew our stops, but that didn’t keep us from sharing wondering looks about the strange, singsong unintelligibility coming out of the speakers as we approached each new station.

So after a couple stations, I stopped thinking of the conductor as just a conductor, but instead as some sort of secular urban equivalent of a Muslim muezzin, who issues the haunting call to prayer. Which would make us passengers, in some way, his congregation.

Subway Muezzin

The conductor on the "Q" today
Was clearly from one of those places
Where they’re always killing each other,
Or where we’re killing them.

So when his recitations
Of upcoming stations
Made no more sense to us
Than a blessing in a desert tongue

It was easy to imagine him
A subway muezzin,
Whose words
We understood simply
As the sacred summons
We already knew by heart

And at every stop
The faithful,
Having arrived at their appointed place
At their appointed time,
Dispersed.