Resurrecting an Old Poem

I have written poetry off and on since I was a teenager (why I stopped for a longish while when I was about 19 is a story for someday - maybe). I decided to pull out the high school literary magazines I had some poems published in. I lived in central Illinois and would go to visit my sister who was at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale from time to time which explains this poem. I decided that, it being the 1960s and my being a teenager, the others that were published were, shall we say, a bit pretentious. So, here's my resurrected poem:

Journey from Carbondale to Champaign 

The snow falls on.
The wheels clack around.
The lonely white stretches
        outward in the horizon –
        meeting white with white.
Fields covered by snow and stubble,
        The brown of life given up.

Inside the warm car strangers
          sit and talk to other strangers,
Telling things of uneventful
          importance. A grasp at
          human warmth and closeness.

          At each stop
By ones and twos they leave.
         Going forth
         from warmth to cold.
And then they track to
         warmth again – eventually.

The train whistle calls the cold.
It haunts the distance in
         lonely echoes, and tosses the cold
         pale notes.

The wheels clack around.
The lonely white stretches
        outward in the horizon –
        meeting white with white.
Fields covered by snow and stubble,
       The brown of life given up.

       And the silent snow falls on. 

This poem seems a bit appropriate for the weather today here in Vermont: cold and snowy. It would be nice to have March weather soon rather than mid-winter weather.

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The photograph is by Josh Applegate. I found it on unsplash.com. Please click here to find out more about me, my services and my book, Opening the Heart: Meditations on How to Be.