Poetry

Fixing the Tracks

It comes in the night time

Juts in to faint noise from silence

Creeps in to open metal jaws

Of what was before

Not there anymore.

It is not an instance of disrepair

Which causes the black machine to

Groan down, rung after rung

Fixing the thing.

It has been gradually worn.

It is the squeezed out shrieking

Once silhouetted against the groggy, half waking,

Sleeping world which tells me

I am normally asleep when this happens,

I was once at home for nightmares.

There is a schism in the sound.

The one where woken you would feel it is too loud,

And this is too much

But it is dark, and there are no others on the street

To rouse you from your bed,

Listening in and out.

I was not even under my covers.

So when the bass and tenor chink and

Chime in against the unbearably pure piercing thin

Beginning of that scream,

make it cover the depth of a chasm,

Things start to shake and grate

I realise the shrill is inevitable,

Metal v metal.  You have to make your love grow dim.

Catherine Dickinson