Thanks to everyone who participated in last week’s Photo Play and poetry prompt. Our photographers have a spirit of adventure, and here are a few of the snapshots shared among our Tweetspeak community.
In the photograph above, Richard captured a grand dame from the golden age of train travel.
And let’s not forget how LW’s humorous photo manipulation made us smile.
Here we see how Susan used train rails to guide the eye.
Our poets drew inspiration from a single image and laid down the tracks for us to travel along. We’re glad Jody shared this poem with us:
If words were pictures, I’d see them there,
A string of suspended steps
sunk into the sky.
Mine, a stairway—
I said goodbye and went on…
climbing upward, upward.
Yours—a thousand steps, but ground-level, flat;
stretching forward in a solitary line.
You said, “I almost died, ”
then put one foot in front of the other
and continued to live
one painful step at a time,
transporting you away,
slowly moving forward like a train.
The rolling rumble carrying you along
as you survive, just barely.
Your words trail off in the distance
with the sorry, sad sound of worn out wheels,
and I’m left standing by the tracks
tasting smoke, listening to the faint, fading whistle
while you die.
POETRY PROMPT: Choose one of the photographs above and write a poem. You get to be the conductor of this prompt. 🙂
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Be sure to check out the highlights from Photo Prompt participants on the Photo Play Pinterest board! And keep clicking and/or playing with words.
Featured photo by Billie, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post photos by LW Lindquist, Richard Maxson, and S. Etole. Creative Commons license via Flickr. Post by Heather Eure.
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Sometimes we feature your poems in Every Day Poems, with your permission of course. Thanks for writing with us!
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Maureen Doallas says
LW’s photo manipulation makes me laugh.
Will Willingham says
It was fun to find another use for that one. 🙂
Jody Lee Collins says
Well, thank you for featuring this poem here, Ms. LL. I wrote that several years ago after a very, very sad email conversation with a friend. Shortly after that I was in Seattle near the train station and the sounds and sights seemed to match my feelings in some odd way. It seemed an apt metaphor.
Richard Maxson says
https://www.flickr.com/photos/125528196@N08/15407575220/
Film
The memory of a train when I was three
rests in window vapor and a lie that waited
in the confusion of my Mother’s tears.
Glass is hardened sand, it steals the liquid
from our breath to confound our sight.
He would not buy her ice cream was the answer
from my Aunt as, waving with one hand to her eyes,
the station platform poles pushed her away.
Now,
what to make of trains and tears.
Leaving is the starkest of days remembered,
making a slow, beautiful beast of meeting
that burns us like celluloid if we stop
to remember good-byes,
the tracks and sprocket holes demanding we moved our life along.
Jody Lee Collins says
‘leaving is the starkest of days remembered.’ Wow, what a line, Richard.
Richard Maxson says
Here’s one more. Funny how inspiration works.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/125528196@N08/14989516673/in/photostream/
Following Butterflies
What if the trains never stopped for us,
leaving us with nothing but their vacant gust
and the memory of faces in the windows?
Every day we’d show up on the wood and concrete
platforms of the world with our cases of paper and clothes,
waiting.
Soon the anticipation runs to desperation, then
anger, then speculation and finally horror.
Nothing stops them.
The newspapers, TV, social media inform us of talks,
but soon their chatter joins the barking of neighborhoods,
hum of traffic and air-conditioning, crack of gunfire
and the endless chant of campaigns.
Soldiers are called, but on the trains there are people
who never age generation after generation,
the debate passes with the senselessness of fashion.
Eventually, the platforms crumble, the burning sends
the final realization in the winnowing of smoke;
flowers in short rows appear in the world,
their stems strengthened by the periodic winds that bend them,
behind the soldiers they grow, never for bouquets.
Walking by, no one remembers the butterflies
hovering slowly over flowers, the tiffany of their wings
pulling colors out of sunlight for no apparent reason.
Donna Saliba says
This poem was written during a train trip from Cleveland to Portland, OR a few years ago. I loved it and can’t wait to go on another one!
River Through the Wood
Below the mountain sides
Dotted
With evergreens,
A cold blue stream
Bathed and warmed in August sun,
Winds its way about
East Glacier Park;
A hug enfolds a friend.
Nature in harmony-
As the world should be.
Train travels through time,
Takes you to
A place
Free from frenzied life,
Brings you in to peace.
Donna Dissauer Saliba
Professional Prose
Robbie Pruitt says
Love in Parallel
Around the bend
Of track where parallels
Seem to merge into one
The unknown is embraced
With the hope of Unity
© October 25, 2014, Robbie Pruitt
http://robbiepruitt.tumblr.com
Robbie Pruitt says
Here is the photo with the poem, Love in Parallel: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10152823692631738&set=a.10150316253511738.360026.514171737&type=1&theater