Stream Train’s Immersion

Colonise, they rally, come out of hiding make vineyards for my railway yards;

Hungry as flesh and fruit in their holiday playgrounds men become boys again.

Always the turn of civilisation again for a mind of technical and mechanised

Invention where mesmerised like the Ramadan we made a turn for new speed.

A world which fell in love with its energy forms and life or rails, now bunkered

For coal and searching for all its bogeys beyond the shape of any Mondrian.

Pungent steamers leave along its line the debris of pollution speaking for the

Sorrows and endeavours in a fallout of smoke and steam unravelling history.

Time and fantasy unwound within lives made for their tempest, railed against!

Against majesty and devotion of splendour for the modern, a noisy clashing of

Wonders. In a climate of surrender they for occasion slumber bedded in sheds;

Gone today for the viaducts and for another holiday massaging against loneliness.

A rail motor with a spotlight lantern is out hunting to catch drivers and foxes;

Just the vixen of all these explorations and travailing for ever in this daylight,

The winter sun warms me across my shoulders, restoring insight and love of life;

A solitary pigeon perhaps alarmed by this has settled with confusion and made

Home on my balcony, a lonely bandstand for this sheltering friend and stranger;

Where each little meditation is a prayer for life and within its galloping delight.

For these strangers as a herald for each fugitive beyond a fugue of steamy smoke;

And theirs is to bring the delight of calling drivers, and for as reaching to a pigeon.

My warm husbandry for its watching; gone now, and leaving a vacant perch under

Its clever sky, for like me it has even captured the rain of everlasting insight with

A perfect stranger. Departed from me and often now recognised as the stallion

Apart, my little stall feels as picturesque and I wait for a raven to call a bird call;

Perhaps hindered and frightened by this smoking travesty in its delight, where I

In the waiting morning hours wait like a child of the Ramadan, my immersion

Is true, knowing grass will not grow again until spring? Sunlight makes its spotlight;

And the cyclamens will grow for a friend’s garden beyond any perfunctory delight.