To Gdansk Poem by John a'Beckett

Somewhere north of Toruń rails clink.
The Fairly Fast Train shakes with speed.
Buried in another world of stories, we
passengers, surfacing from words, blink
up into the light, away from what we read.

Forests flicker past, quick shadows cast on
endless rows of spruces at small-coin sun
minted as far from us as Moscow, Minsk:
a counter current to the shift-shunting one
we think we live by, know we need. Speed

lets the spread Pomerania lethargically unfold:
mushroom leaf, moss, mistletoe, all half-asleep
in early snow; the rambling landscape of an old
story we all know but no one's told; think:
all this history was once beneath the sea.

Forests end, villages appear whose peasants
go about their chores on horse-drawn cart or
slumped on stacks of straw, drink sun, ignore
this locomotive blast, nor give a nod, a wink
to this noise of a New Poland that 'must be! '.

In one such village, a peasant girl ensconced
in scything turns her shawled face now to glance
at us, ghosts of a future flashing, too advanced
for her to find; my fellow-passenger observes 'See,
that girl there only thirty years ago was me! '

So questions surface. Did we loose village life?
Catch the right decision or direction? Loose the link?
Forests give way to houses, propositions are enhanced
by doubts, memories, portents. The train ignores them,
guns us instead to destinations, duties and Gdań sk.