How the Cinders Danced

This is a homecoming poem only in the sense that I had returned to the place where I grew up.

There were no welcoming crowds, no band ... and I hadn't expected any. I had walked around town, looking for a familiar face, but found none. I ended up at the site of the bridge where a frightening experience had etched itself on my memory.

And how frightening a steam locomotive could be to a youngster, especially up close, as I recalled its being as my grandmother and I were caught walking across that bridge ... with a freight train passing underneath.

Standing there, alone, brought that memory rushing back to me.

How quiet now! How calm. How vivid the memory of those cinders "dancing" on the deck of that bridge! I just had to write about it.

It later received recognition as a Plainsongs Award Poem, published in their October, 2005, issue.

HOW THE CINDERS DANCED

Cold, I stand recalling

how the cinders danced

on the highway bridge

while I watched a slowly

swaying freight train

creaking beneath us,

its dark, hulking engine

chuffing like a dragon,

hot cinders swirling

up, dark clouds seeking

the walkway, our lungs;

how my hand lingered

in Grandma's after that

frightening train had

gone clacking off, and I

stand here now, alone,

a stranger come home,

breathing clear air,

no cinders dancing, no

engine chuffing, but

my gloved hand rising

to a sudden welling up

that causes a blurring

of childhood images.

© 2005

***

Today's word: chuffing

(OK, so I made up the word, but that's how I remember the sound that the steam engine made as it struggled underneath the bridge. Oh, and the art? It's one of my oil paintings, a shuttered window in an old barn. Titled "Mon Reposo," it has nothing to do with the poem, really, but it caught my eye, and I thought you wouldn't mind ... )

Afterthoughts ... in response to your comments:

Ah, yes, Helen, those steam engines pulling those freight trains ... and, in those days, passenger trains, too ... back and forth on the Illinois Central tracks. We lived just across a gavel road from the train tracks, and grew accustomed to the engines' daytime song ... and nighttime lullaby (at least to us). When we had overnight guests, though, they almost invariably came to the breakfast table the next morning, complaining that they hadn't slept a wink because of "all those trains." Then there was the time the first "streamlined train" came through, headed for New Orleans ...