But oh what kind of trains are these that I never saw before,
Snatching up the refugees from the ghettoes of the war,
To stand confused with all their worldly goods
Beneath the watching guard's disdain;
As young and old go rolling on the clicking wheels of trains.
And the driver only does this job with vodka in his coat,
And he turns around and makes a sign with his hand across his throat.
For days on end, through sun and snow,
The destination still remains the same
For those who ride with death, above the clicking wheels of trains.
Trains:
What became of the innocence they had in childhood games;
Painted red or blue, when I was young they all had names.
Who'll remember the ones who only rode in them to die,
All their lives are just a smudge of smoke against the sky.
Excerpt from Trains by Al Stewart
For vines and olive trees,
Marble well-governed cities
And ships upon untamed seas,
But there on the shining metal
His hands had put instead
An artificial wilderness
And a sky like lead.
-
A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,
Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign.
-
Out of the air a voice without a face
Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place:
No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.
-
She looked over his shoulder
For ritual pieties,
White flower-garlanded heifers,
Libation and sacrifice,
But there on the shining metal
Where the altar should have been,
She saw by his flickering forge-light
Quite another scene.
-
Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot:
A crowd of ordinary decent folk
Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.
The mass and majesty of this world, all That carries weight and always weighs the same Lay in the hands of others; they were small And could not hope for help and no help came: What their foes like to do was done, their shame Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride And died as men before their bodies died.
-
She looked over his shoulder
For athletes at their games,
Men and women in a dance
Moving their sweet limbs
Quick, quick, to music,
But there on the shining shield
His hands had set no dancing-floor
But a weed-choked field.
-
A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.
-
The thin-lipped armorer,
Hephaestos, hobbled away,
Thetis of the shining breasts
Cried out in dismay
At what the god had wrought
To please her son, the strong
Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
Who would not live long.
-
W. H. Auden - The Shield of Achilles BlueLancer - thanks for sharing Al Stewart's Trains. David Mamet has a new book out called 'Recessional - the Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch. I think you'll enjoy it.