that lonesome whistle blows

a train whistle sounds
though there’s not a set of tracks
for forty miles, some trucker,
maybe, wants us to think
he’s an engineer,

a little boy’s leftover dream,
making boring days seem more
in the eyes of other men,
who like him, wish
they had grasped the reins
while the horse was within reach.

6 thoughts on “that lonesome whistle blows

  1. I like it and I think you nailed it.
    There will always be a market for those things.

    I lived here 10 years before I heard the train one overcast day . Its about 15 miles away and my kinfolk told me you could hear it sometimes.
    Pretty cool , thanks for putting train whistles in my head today.

  2. A branch line goes right behind our house, so we hear trains fairly often.

    A lot of railfans probably fit the description in this cool poem. They’d all sell their grandmothers if they could just sit in the cab on a modern locomotive.

    Malcolm

Leave a Reply