An Expatriate Kansan Rides
               the Train of Remembering

by Tom Reynolds

 

My trip into the vanished past

is prodded by springs in my seat,

cracked vinyl scraping an elbow,

and thirst for water, not truth.

 

This train ain’t bound for glory,

just a slow sixty miles down country,

through thickets and shorn fields,

weaving on unsafe tracks.

 

Today’s train ain’t no showpiece,

just an engine and three rusted cars,

soot seeping through cracks,

till I wonder what I was thinking

 

traveling into Kansas this way,

my life there on that Oswego farm

surrounded by woods and trees,

the slow trickle of a muddy creek,

 

crags below the wooden bridge,

a black hawk circling the hedge,

the farmhouse beyond the hill,

and despite all, enduring love.

 

I should have gone first class.

 

 

 

 

All poetry on this page
Copyright © by their authors - 2009, 2011

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