A Train Station in Winter

Lined benches with the dark overcoats and tipped hats.

The solemn.

The despaired.

The many.

Sheltered into place, shoulder to shoulder,

as how the war left them.

Even the women, whom never played a part,

were finally equal to men.

Wind-swept doorways on equal adjacent sides

bring forth the Father in full force.

Lingering frostbite forced deep into pockets

filled with junk;

the paperclip pricks the finger,

enough blood to cover Lincoln’s head

and feed a family of one.

Eerily silent, for a winter’s eve at work

yet only the door speaks on its hinges.

A creak, a slam, a normalcy.

Soundwaves echo between and around

the ghosts of the hall;

green benches rowlock upon the Flemish bond stone.

The stone, has seen the last of them,

pitter-patters now fifty years old,

still remember the time when they all left their home:

energetic, gay, and doe-eyed men.

Now sit flat-backed with their hazy marbles

stuck in too deep; the pockets of nightmares

streaked across their faces.

Like the alighted crow from battlefields’ end

them too, have feasted upon dead.

The faintest smile arises with the clouded moon,

as the little girl stands to wait for her Father

to step onto the tracks.

He is but a third the age of gargoyles,

but knows the time on pocket watches

halfway around the world.

The little yellow raincoat flutters in the breeze

relieving the warm passage between the hands

of Father and daughter.

The rogue harbinger now signs the call

to rally the men to arms, the women to toils.

They are packed deep into the Mother’s breast

where pneumonia spreads thin and later dies.

He is accepted, along with the hundreds of statues.

Into the world she was accepted,

by her very own Mother, six years earlier.

Off again he goes, in noble garb tailored tight,

and the little girl, the contrasting hue of stars,

slowly watches her tears turn to ice.

Her father’s voice lingers within the stillness,

when the motions of man and machine have ceased,

“My daughter, my life. I will return home again.”