Once you’re away from the city
no more overhead, no gantries
or clutter, just the clean mainline,
double-track all the way south
to Melbourne. Your train’s a cool
cocoon connected only to the rails,
the caterpillar that creaks around curves,
that twists on the gravel snakeway,
smooth with steel, bracketed by
the old montage of signals, cuttings,
concrete sleepers.
The diesel grinds
growling into the grades, purrs
downhill as if relieved of strain,
clatters onwards, noisy with stress,
as the Southern Highlands glide by.
Unattached to circuitry or suburb,
rolling like celluloid, the train
spools away and you’re audience
to this high, hard, eroded land,
the fences and farms of a landscape
like an old movie faded now
to yellow and the washed-out green
of wind-dried grass, of scrub and hills,
there beyond the camera’s track.
Outside your window, old landscapes
like a film screening for you.
John Egan is a Sydney poet who also lives on the south coast of NSW. He has published four books of poetry, the most recent is Lines Continues Forever, and a fifth is in preparation. He is a retired teacher and often writes of the sea and landscape.