Sweet Sweet Fantasy "Poetry" Friday

Train Tracks by Bob Dylan
(seriously...did you know he painted?)

So...I think I am going start posting some of my poems regularly....

Here is one I wrote like 4 years ago when I was on my way home to Utah from my Grad School interviews in New York City--going home on a train (which should be, from the home, pretty evident).

Anyway, I pulled it out a couple weeks ago and did some re-working. I like re-visiting poems and other things which I have written years ago. The old writing always makes me cringe and feel a little ashamed, naked and nauseated--which in turn makes me wanna fix it....

So, here it is....after some fixin' (in another few years it may get some more fixin')

please share your thoughts.



Ode to myself, reading on a train.


For fear of the luminous steel bird’s belly,
and bending to my tight-breathing tears,
I take the iron winding beast from Penn Station,
twenty two hundred miles across this country.

Through merging images on glass,
eagles on the Hudson and herons on the Colorado
fly away from the pages of my books,
always asking me who I am.

I am along the gray, green, windy waves of Michigan,
with the hazy, black towers of Chicago forward and beyond.
I am suspended on these rails above the fading grains,
rusting combines and turbines and dying cities falling away.

I am chasing silver foxes above Denver with my eyes
and mourning little metal bugs on nation-wide windows.
I am joining concrete and clay at Grand Junction,
touching bleeding earth and turning inking histories.

O Omaha, O Pioneers,
and Tennessee and Tony!
O Henry David, O Fyodor,
and Walt—the child of Joyce and Wilde!

I am not a real Irishman, Englishman, a Frenchman or American.
To be true, I am not, by generations, a good Mormon boy, either.
I am not a hunter-rider of the plains; a farmer of the Eastern forests
And I am not—yet—a willing member of that band marching forth from the Castro.

I am just along these amber green lands,
reading white and blustered skies.
A passenger for fear—and
counting every breath.

© 2005, 2008 Nathan T. Wright

Night Train by Kent Whitaker