'Twas balmy weather on the fool's gold path, the track that fashioned foes of friends. Though storms upon it lost their identity, how they did rage on all the same. "Twas a tyranny of the heart, dear lassie, that way that was no way at all. "Twas an extinguishing of the soul's hearth, dear laddie, and upon it none can rekindle the flame. Harken to this warning. Let it not meet a single sole. Upon it darkness is ever clothed in white, fur trimmed, eyes bright - demons as angels will come in twisted song. Day to night. Right to wrong. Dark to pseudo light. So traveller beware. Beware! For the bewitching hour hath begun!
The city streets were a washed out grey. The sky was a rock-pounded denim. Birdsong trickled out in dented waves, as if feathered friends cried this way. Engines started and stopped. Horns honked. Crowds, heads low, kept their eyes on concrete cracks. No whispers. No chat. Either yelling or nothing at all. Society, society, wherefore art thou society?
All the days of my life the river flowed, merrily chattering to both sun and stars. Come the sunny weather, we bathed in her orchestral flow. For at times she was the languid cello bow before transforming into the playful flute and back again. Even as the days grew short and the ground sparkled cold, we could watch her ‘starry, starry night’ eddies. Always we saw her as a friend, as family, as a protected part of our community.
The spring trees stood tall, branches raised and roots well anchored. As their buds opened to the warming light, as they took deep drafts of the generous rain, it was as if they were a soul choir.
Summer was choir and orchestra too; it was the ballad of the birds and the slow percussion of waves. My dreams of those days are inked with the fragrance of street food and the drumming of local bands. How the sunlight laughed and the dappled shade played. The playgrounds were full and every cafe crowd spilled out in wide chaotic arcs. That was summer; that was then.
In that maple dawn, upon a yawn of prairies, the train arced into a visual grin. Gentle clicking as percussion, huckleberry fuelled chickadees as choir, it sang each yard as loudly as a sonnet’s mile. Through wide prairies and mountain passes same, it took the grandest of landscapes, in easy stride. Uphill or down, easy plains or rocky screes, wheels turned. Its chassis, water freckled during the starlit hours, soon dried to a glossy sheen. The engine master smiled, sipping coffee, eyes a dreamy gaze, for if the tracks were his nation's arteries, surely he had become its pulse.