WAITING FOR THE NIGHT TRAIN

As though time were a grain, I am young again

Waiting on a bridge for a Swanage train

Waiting agog under a black quilted sky

On a narrow country lane, where above me the sigh

Of whispering trees stirred by a lazy breeze

Spawn madcap bats made of tattered top-hats

While an unseen owl hoots its lonesome refrain

To the hushed rasp of crickets…

But as yet no train

 

With telegraph wires humming, which the breeze likes strumming

Where soon will a night train be hissing and drumming

Here glow-worms like spangles cast specks of queer light

And sweet distant Swanage makes a similar sight

Its streetlamps too shy to offend the sky

I listen with arms now like goose-bump farms

And with my trousers besmirched by a bicycle chain

I gaze at dark hills and wait and wait…

But as yet no train

NIGHT WHISPERS

Hush the Milky Way this chilly, chilly night

Steadfast beyond our earthly breeze

Beyond gnarled oak fingers clutching eerie light

In whispering picture-frame trees

Here twinkle a trillion pin-holes leaking eternal light

And a moon trapped by leafy creation

To turn the woodland a ghostly white

And make silver a little country station

IRON ROADS

This my era, this my age

Steam, not muscle, turns this page

And want drives the peasant from the farmland raw

To the mine, the mill, and factory floor

 

Forge and hardship, street and row

Rivers of white-hot metal flow

To run through the valleys and set rock hard

In rail, and junction, and marshalling yard

 

Which turns the wheels of this new age

Which boasts its might through the pressure gauge

And by spangling crucibles laden with heat

Proves the mettle of man with each iron feat

 

From horse-drawn bounty at farmer's gate

To city-bound trains of thundering freight

From weary travellers upon muddy trails

To cosseted passengers riding the rails

 

Now banished are the pot-holes that jangle the nerves

Banished also, those serpentine swerves

The highway robbers have disappeared too

Their trade destroyed by folk speeding through