Standing on the wooden platform
of this old fashioned train depot,

I remember how I once waited impatiently
for trains to take me away,
waited in stations as long
as football stadiums,
New York, Paris, Tokyo,
waited eagerly to travel on trains
whose wheels clicked and clacked
to the edge of a new world.

Now I stand on this platform
where the train no longer arrives.
I stand as still as the white egret
who sometimes hides in the marsh grasses
where the train tracks once ended.

No longer such an intrepid traveler,
I am content to watch
the sailboats flutter by,
inhale the wisps of a summer breeze,
the familiar smell of brackish water,
or study the light,
as fine as a piece of gossamer cloth,
as it slips over hills
that soften and change,
from green to sunset gold.

Across the strait,
a train’s whistle-
for thirty years,
the distant sound
of someone else’s journey
always bringing me home.

Johanna Ely is Benicia’s current poet laureate.

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