Random Impressions from the Train

(New York City, Washington D.C., Chicago, Lawrence)

For Gloria Price, Anita Herzfeld, and Dorothy Mosby

The Bronx is: so long!
Penn Station: Hi there!
Trenton is, come on!
Trees are ladies and children and men
In salt and pepper of green, red, yellow and gold
At school, at work, at church, at play
“And you my soul?” As Whitman said
The City Of Fraternal Love
and Baltimore smile at us
Echoes of “Desiderata”
Nature and Applied Science
Tangle and struggle and fight
Nature won’t give in to men’s abuse

Will you my soul?

Massachusetts smiles from afar
Pregnant with poetry, learning,
Language, culture and art,

You my soul?

Rivers and lakes trees and sun and sky;
some whisper, some murmur,
and some even shout:

“We won’t give up, noooo, never
We’re here to stay, for keeps”

And you my soul?

Ware houses what do you store?
Power houses what’s power any way?
Trees, churches, streams,
Church yard, trees, bridges,
Freeways, highways, by ways,
Trees, factories, farmlands, chimneys,
Yellow, grey, wires, cables, marshes,
Birds, tiny cottages blending
In with hills, brooks, woods
“Et Voilá: Washington, D.C“
A bride in full white
Besieged by too many grooms
Seat of the Union?
And you my soul?
Arches, Robins, protesters,
Power, trees,
Marble, marble, marbl, mar…
Again
Bloody Mary and the Virgin’s state:
places and things on flight
blists of sunbeams peeping through
Clouds and houses and white picket fences
trees

And you my soul?

High rises, no scrapers,
Pets Squirrels in parks
And cars, men at work,
And are we in the middle of nowhere?
No, they just don’t tell us where we “be”

And you my soul?

Pittsburgh a city on a shelf
Whose feet are shoed by a pond
Indiana: sheep, cows, horses, meadows
Those wanting to see Van Gogh’s
Grains of yellow, harvesters,
sheaves, suns, try the fields of Illinois
at sunset in October
No painting compares!!!
Chicago neat, lady-like
at the lake sits, laden with history:
labor struggles, racial struggles
May day, May Day, May Day!!!
Oh, if I could read the writings
in the clouds by the hand of God…
It’s a pity that shadows
take over
my colors go out
and paraphrasing Dickinson:
“I cannot see to see”.
Darkness has his way with me.
Missouri: only silhouettes
a few far off eyes squinting
in the lightless horizon

And you my soul?

Halsted: San Francisco in Chicago?

You my soul?

Silos, bales, “heno”, pumpkins,
herons, square, round, square, round,
smoking hills, oceans of brown,
whispers of Hawaii and Africa
and the Obamas
Wow, wow, wow!!!
The Mississippi mother of waters
where God prepared the universal deluge
and Twain: steam boats, Tom Sawyer,
Huckleberry Finn, the Little Rascals,
Lazarillo de Tormes and a million
little boys rush to our minds,
and down stream

and you soul of mine?

Kansas, finally
Lawrence at midnight!
SOMEWHERE in the middle of no Where
A beautiful bunch of angels
Nicely stuffed in an automobile
A University City and much more:
students, teachers, intellectuals, sports,
champions, 50 years of friendship
with Costa Rica
Books, books, Costa Rican authors
and books again
Kansas City, Missouri: sophisticated
and so neat.
Museum of art,
We go Chinese, mmmm

Soul of mine?

Ms. Herzfeld brings memory
of Whitman’s “Noiseless, Patient Spider”
and Annancy goes with me
day and night and night and day
train after train, and train and train
Thanks for your company
whispering, knitting, spinning,
prancing Stories for almost a thousand years:
over there then over here:
of love, of struggles, of labor, of slavery,
of lynching, of pioneering for freedom,
of progress and frontier on the run,
of wit
And Annancy goes to college
in Lawrence
Linguistics: Limon Creole,
story telling,
exams.
Russian’s silence,
Joseph Conrad’s groanings
Cafta, Cafta, Cafta

Yesh man mi fain mishelf
ina mis Anita classh pan campush
“an dat a punkush pan pankash…”

Franklyn Perry P. Author...

Por ser uno de sus primeros poemas publicados:

3 espejos de oro y diamante, es decir, buen inicio...

Para La Coleccionista de Espejos: Delia Mc Donald Woolery