At sunrise, heavens maple-hued, the Via Rail train click-clicked on and on. Wheels and steel gravity bonded, its song was a rappity tap tap. Passed blushed mirror lakes of migrating geese, it was industrial hour’s poetry and great onward ballad. Gentle, strong, ever hard at work, assuring it’s destiny one humble turn at a time.
Train track, as earthbound ladder, absorbed the wide and generous curves. It’s clickety clack was the sweetest of rolling belly laughs. Maple clouds giggled in the sky above with a smiling cherry sun. From birdsong to the whisper of evergreens, the air’s ambiance came as a soul-wink. Mischief was in the air. One could taste it, feel it, from warming marrow to growing smirk. Something gloriously funny was afoot.
In that maple dawn, upon a yawn of prairies, the train arced into a visual grin. Gentle clicking as percussion, huckleberry fuelled chickadees as choir, it sang each yard as loudly as a sonnet’s mile. Through wide prairies and mountain passes same, it took the grandest of landscapes, in easy stride. Uphill or down, easy plains or rocky screes, wheels turned. Its chassis, water freckled during the starlit hours, soon dried to a glossy sheen. The engine master smiled, sipping coffee, eyes a dreamy gaze, for if the tracks were his nation's arteries, surely he had become its pulse.
I took comfort as the bag hugged itself into my gentle form, the train rocking its maternal rhythm, anchored to centuries old rails.
The train ride is a sweet meditation, feeling a the countryside pass as one masterpiece of art.
The train ride rocks me so gently as if I were a sweet babe in this carriage.