Saturday, April 18, 2009

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? One of my photographs ... and, no, that's not the bridge mentioned in the poem; it's a Nature-provided "bridge" along the trail at one of my favorite walking places.)

1 comment:

Helen in FL said...

Another haunting, but not unpleasant picture, at all. It brought back memories of the trains and my daddy taking me to see them. We mailed our letters on them instead of at the post office. Daddy took me to the roundhouse where the noise was an unbelievable roar while they fixed the steam engines below us. He loved it and I was afraid, but I didn't mean to let him know that. I wonder if he did.