Night train to Moscow

The engine scowls above the tracks
With its brooding Breshnev face
Sad as a Slav, dark as a gun barrel
Its one in the morning, and it waits
As all Russians wait with patience
Russians are the greates waiters in the world.



At one fifteen, the passengers go forward
Carrying bags on rounded shoulders
Shuffle with purposeful quiet steps
Drifting ghosts through cavernous stations
Their clothes and hair smell of tobacco
Smelling of oiled wood and of old wool.



Street lamps tear white holes in the darkness,
And burrowing through the blanket
of the night go nameless travelers--
Twelve mothers with children, two Turks,
A bearded Hindu, two hundred workmen
Torn by their jobs from their homes,


And one American, joining the others
The conductor hurries me up the ladder
Into the belly of great black beast.
Like the others, measuring the turns
Of the wheels and the number of miles
That stretch between me and my family



There is a sameness to all places
And all people who struggle to remember
Their paths to distant glowing homes
Tonight, I am one with Odysseus and Gulliver
And all the wanderers for countless years
Who have passed through distant lands unknown.



n the glowing rail car, my rest is peaceful
Looking out on this alien night and know
That the Watchful Eye holds me in His gaze
And holds my loved ones in His care
And the same star that guards my land
Guards me on my long way home.