Coming Home
Five minutes here, and they must steal two more!
shameful! Here have I been five mortal years
and not seen home nor one dear kindred face,
and these abominable slugs, this guard,
this driver, porters--what are they about?--
keep us here motionless, two minutes, three.--
Aha! at last!
Good! We shall check our minutes;
we're flying after them, like a mad wind
chasing the leaves it has tossed on in front.
Oh glorious wild speed, what giants' play!
and there are men who tell us poetry
is dead where railways come! Maybe 'tis true,
I'm a bad judge, I've had scant reading time
and little will to read ...... and certainly
I've not found railways in what verse I know:
but there's a whizz and whirr as trains go by,
a bullet-like indomitable rush
and then all's done, which makes me often think
one of those men who found out poetry,
and had to write the things just that they saw,
would have made some of their fine crashing lines
that stir one like the marches one knows best,
and the enemy knows best, with trains in them
as easily as chariots.
Anyhow
I've poetry and music too to-day
in the very clatter: it goes "Home, home, home."
And they'll think that sharp shriek a kinder sound
than sweetest singing, when it presently
pierces the quiet of the night and sends
its eager shrillness on for miles before
to say I'm no time distant. I can see
my mother's soft pink cheeks (like roses, pale
after a June week's blooming,) flush and wan,
and her lip quiver; I can see the girls,
restless between the hall door and the clock,
hear it and hush and lean expectant heads
to catch the rattle of the coming train;
my father, sitting pshawing by the fire
at all the fuss and waiting, half start up,
dropping his Times, forgetful just so long
that he is not impatient like the rest,
the tender foolish women, and, alert
to hide how he was tempted to fuss too,
reseat himself intent on politics;
and Hugh--I think Hugh must be there with them,
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poem by Augusta Davies Webster
Added by Poetry Lover
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