A Different Kind of Lullaby for Poetry Friday

Poetry Friday is hanging out today with Jim at Hey, Jim Hill.

My father-in-law and son, a long time ago, final run!

        My husband’s father was a railroad engineer for Union Pacific in the last years of his long railroad career.  We now have a number of different train memorabilia in our home because of him.  My husband talks of many trips his family took on the trains.  It sounds like such fun and I am also nostalgic about train trips after reading Agatha Christie’s Murder On The Orient Express and watching old movies where love and intrigue reside on the rails.  I grew up with others taking those trips and took one myself, with my Girl Scout troop, to Washington D.C.  Imagine the hours of giggling, hardly sleeping there and back!  I am grateful to our leaders who sacrificed their time and maybe sanity by taking us.

It’s a delight when I find prose and poetry about train travel, I read the words, and sometimes find them memorable enough to read to my husband.  Lately, on a website called The Daily Poem, a particular poem appeared with such rhythm and sweetness that I wanted to share it with you, and of course I shared it first with my husband. 

       I also found a little about Alicia Stallings, who is still writing and has published several books of poetry.  She is known as a classical poet, has translated from the Greek and lives with her husband and son in Athens, Greece.  More poems and a short bio can be found at The Poetry Foundation.

Lullaby Near The Railroad Tracks 

                         by Alicia E. Stallings

Go back to sleep.  The hour is small.

         A freight train between stations

Shook you out of sleep with all

         Its lonely ululations.

                        The rest can be found here.

The sheet music to an original composition that was created for a choir using Lullaby Near The Railroad Tracks by Paul Crabtree can be found here, .

     As I researched, I found one more poem by Stallings that I thought wonderful to share, titled Fairy-tale Logic.  I imagine that students might love this particular poem about fairy tales.

Fairy-tale Logic

Fairy tales are full of impossible tasks:

Gather the chin hairs of a man-eating goat,

Or cross a sulphuric lake in a leaky boat,

              Read the rest of those heinous tasks here.