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Trains and Tracks Poetry Prompt: A Ticket to Anywhere

By Heather Eure 5 Comments

See the world through the window of a train. Travel unhindered and experience the beauty of unspoiled vistas. Don’t forget to bring your notebook, there’s poetry waiting to be found along the rails.

Thanks to everyone who participated in last week’s poetry prompt. Here’s a poem from Richard we enjoyed:

What if the trains never stopped for us,

leaving us with nothing but their vacant gust
and the memory of faces in the windows?

Every day we’d show up on the wood and concrete
platforms of the world with our cases of paper and clothes,

waiting.

Soon the anticipation runs to desperation, then
anger, then speculation and finally horror.

Nothing stops them.

The newspapers, TV, social media inform us of talks,
but soon their chatter joins the barking of neighborhoods,
hum of traffic and air-conditioning, crack of gunfire
and the endless chant of campaigns.

Soldiers are called, but on the trains there are people
who never age generation after generation,
the debate passes with the senselessness of fashion.

Eventually, the platforms crumble, the burning sends
the final realization in the winnowing of smoke;
flowers in short rows appear in the world,

their stems strengthened by the periodic winds that bend them,
behind the soldiers they grow, never for bouquets.

Walking by, no one remembers the butterflies
hovering slowly over flowers, the tiffany of their wings
pulling colors out of sunlight for no apparent reason.

—by Richard Maxson

 

POETRY PROMPT: You’re at the train station, you’ve got your ticket, ready to take a railway excursion to any place, real or imagined. Write a poem about the trip of your dreams. Where will you go? What will you see along the way?

 

Photo by Nelson L. Creative Commons license via Flickr. Post by Heather Eure.

________________________

Sometimes we feature your poems in Every Day Poems, with your permission of course. Thanks for writing with us!

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Heather Eure
Heather Eure
Heather Eure has served as the Poetry Editor for the late Burnside Collective and Special Projects Editor for us at Tweetspeak Poetry. Her poems have appeared at Every Day Poems. Her wit has appeared just about everywhere she's ever showed up, and if you're lucky you were there to hear it.
Heather Eure
Latest posts by Heather Eure (see all)
  • Poetry Prompt: Misunderstood Lion - March 19, 2018
  • Animate: Lions & Lambs Poetry Prompt - March 12, 2018
  • Poetry Prompt: Behind the Velvet Rope - February 26, 2018

Filed Under: Blog, poetry prompt, poetry teaching resources, Train poems, Trains and Tracks, Travel Poems, writing prompts

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Comments

  1. Richard Maxson says

    October 27, 2014 at 12:17 pm

    Just for fun, since this is the last week for the train theme:

    https://www.flickr.com/photos/125528196@N08/15619141776/

    I Never Said I Was Afraid of Dying
    —Pink Floyd

    With my youth I bought a ticket to seventy,
    wanting its world, distant
    behind some drowsy day in a Paul Simon song.

    Seventy held out its wrinkled and spotted hand
    to take the crushed moths of my fare.

    I would be free in its parks with pigeons and squirrels, I thought,
    comfortable in my baggy clothes, my uniform
    that said, in my pockets I have room enough
    for all the breaths I’ve held.

    Seventy was a train for my ruined ears
    to hear the variations of the Moon,
    as I watched those in the fields kneel to the iron bell—

    seventy was loud as I had hoped, I could hear it,
    The Great Gig in the Sky many stations ahead.

    I watched the rain of age brighten the dead flowers
    behind me on the tracks as it disentangle
    the strings wound round my fingers.

    The engine roars ahead into the dark n
    of my life, like phosphenes blazing
    behind my open eyes. My heart beats
    like a small bird in a belfry about to sound
    in the village of my destination.

    Reply
    • Richard Maxson says

      October 27, 2014 at 12:20 pm

      In the sixth stanza, should be “disentangled.”

      Reply
    • Heather Eure says

      November 2, 2014 at 6:34 pm

      Clever! “Seventy was a train for my ruined ears…” Gosh I like that.

      Reply
      • Richard Maxson says

        November 2, 2014 at 11:14 pm

        I’m glad you liked that line, Heather. That same train is where I eat sweets before dinner, run with sharp objects in my hands, stay up all night and further ruin my ears with 105 watts of power through 3-way Polk Audio speakers listening to Keith Jarrett, SRV, Mozart, Jeanie Bryson, Led Zeppelin and anyone else I choose to without someone saying that will ruin your ears. My answer if they do: they’re already ruined, and oh my, what glorious choirs ruined them!

        Reply
  2. Richard Maxson says

    October 27, 2014 at 1:42 pm

    Thanks for posting my poem.

    Reply

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