Night Train to Melbourne

                    for Moonyeen

By Lee Meitzen Grue

All journeys combine into the journey through time.

I lost a day coming to you,

gain a day going home.

On this train, a shadowy world of sleeping figures

scarcely known, the broken seat our touchstone,

a thought hurtles by

on other tracks,

the acrid smell of bush fire pervades.

Lights distant, stars uppermost,

pinnacles and way stations,

syllables of the disappeared:

Liverpool, Mittagong, Yass, Wagga Wagga

heavy on my foreign tongue. Reflected

in the window our skeletal mass passes

funerary trees, markers

of the lives we’ve touched

rocking on 

somewhere between the buffet

and the last car,

Awake but near sleep

hastening.

*   *   *   *   *

Source: French Quarter Poems