Sleeping on the Train

Previously published by Yellow Medicine Review, 2011. 

Sleeping on the Train

How we remember being so anxious
to get the right train
and we bounced low speed across Slovakia
where machine gunned guards pounded our door at 2 a.m.
and finally we came into a hazed Hungarian dawn
filled with small cement homes
in towns whose names stuck fast to our lips.

And we forgot or maybe never knew
the orphan trains that left New York
with immigrant children
whose parents had to pray their child away
to a better life on a farm or in small towns
somewhere more centered.

And we forgot or maybe never knew
the native people put upon
the great metal beast that gashed through plains
where land and land as far as the eye could see
to what must have been the end of the world
where only water and water and more
and surely they’d never see home again.

And we forgot or maybe never knew
of camps created for those not trusted
it was Japanese and Germans then
who took their few belongings on the train
fingerprinted and removed to secluded locations
where to prove loyalty as the citizens they already were
they could leave camp to fight ancestral lands.

How we remember our adventure
sleeping on the train
expecting to come through night
into a different kind of day.