Lincoln (Poem Required for Class)

The city was small, the kind they often say is embedded
in another and still they gave it a name of its own,
and no one can tell you why.

I left the place I forever called home, or sometimes
heaven,
with nothing
but my favorite shirt on my back and a silver canteen
filled half way with day-old water
that would force me to stop someplace.

The folded paper left on the desk beside
my mother’s rocking chair read:
“escaping from it all”-
a cliche I must have picked up
from a book I forgot I read once,
and it must have been enough because she didn’t come after me
like every boy’s mother would if her baby left.

Sometimes I can still see that amber horizon, glowing
like thin fire in a photograph, the picture still etched
on my mind, there to remind me
of that little town with its own name, that humbled village
founded by someone lonely
like me...
and maybe that’s why it found me.
Call it chance; I didn’t mean to become acquainted.

It became the escape I only saw in foggy dreams
and whimsical wishes every young man must have, to see
something outside his own world, often
his own prison.
But I wasn’t a captive here. I was free.

Passing over the sometimes quiet, sometimes loud
place where trains continued their journeys, and where
the orchard rows stopped and gave way to blue forests,
I paused to gaze upon the length of the railroad tracks, stretching
northbound and southbound, and that’s where I met him-
the little boy at my feet who was playing
in the powdery gravel alone.

I inquired his name and he said, under his still
baby breath, he didn’t have one but sometimes they called him
Lincoln, and I could call him that, too.
Before I could wonder
the reason he didn’t have a name of his own, when the
hidden city that accidentally found me did,
he shoved his little hand into the pocket of his patched overalls
and found a penny, its once lustrous, copper finish aged with time,
no longer reflecting sunlight, or seen from a distance
as a sparkle on the black ground.

Flipping the penny from his dirt-stained thumb, he threw me
a glance that said, “watch this” but without any words, and I did
because I had nowhere else to go, no one else to see unless
fate and chance were introduced and delivered me something new,
something beautiful.

He knelt beside the silver track that was becoming red,
the color of rust that time had rubbed along its surface, much like
the penny in his hand
and he placed the coin tails up on the steel run in front of him, looking
up at me again with chocolate eyes to make sure
I was still watching, and I know I was because I wondered
at the sound of the roaring engine in the distance, the train that boomed
along the railroad tracks, gears clinking and clanging, shifting
up
and down,
up
and down along the rattling wooded way.

With increasing speed, the black train approached the place
where he remained kneeling and placing the old pennies from his pocket
in a row along the silver track; the great monster thundered
with anger in its speed,
and wailed with a mighty blow at the small boy who seemed to ignore
its desperate warning, while I shot
my eyes back and forth as the gap between the two lessened.

With one more glance to assure himself I was still watching him,
and I was, most intently,
he tumbled away from the track just as the train bellowed past, coughing
with inhalation of steam, smoke,
rock, and exhilaration,
and when its last cart had gone,
he approached the tracks again and gathered the pennies, feeling
their weight in the dusty palm of his hand and admiring their new form,
which he presented to me with great pride-
flattened and smooth like untouched water; no longer were they
merely coins, but perfect, copper beauties.
Lincoln smiled.

“I didn’t come here to see a couple of flat pennies, kid” I said
and he looked up at me with those big, chocolate eyes again- eyes that said,
before his voice, “well, then what did you come here for?” And I couldn’t
give him a sufficient answer.

“They never come here for anything,” his smallness continued, rubbing
the newly created treasures in between his fingers, “except just to see
something new,
and that’s why
I like making these pennies flat like this. It’s something new
to look at, and that’s why you came here, I think.”
And I marveled silently at his young wisdom, wisdom
that was too ripe to come from him.

So I forced a smile and broadened by shoulders, too ambitious,
too prideful
to glean a lesson from a boy that I once was, and would never
be again, and I didn’t care to take notice then
of the extent some dreamers go to when they just want
something new to look at.
By chance, my something new found me on railroad tracks-
neglecting.

The headlines in the first page were bold, and bold meant
something unheard of, and something most folks wouldn’t care to read
for fear of falling another step away from perfection
in a small town with its own name.
“Boy Killed Beside Railroad Tracks”
So I filled my canteen all the way to its brim, decided
not to dream anymore
and left for home where there would be nothing new to look at.