Christmas: Orono 1956

Sometimes poems keep changing and changing. Here is an update to a poem a started a long time ago ...

Christmas: Orono 1956

We would sit on the bank and feel the tremble

of the southbound passenger train

as it rolled across the Pine Street grade

trailing a lone red signal light

that beckoned us south to Bangor Maine

down to New York and way out West

but for now we were grade school boys

Christmas pajamas and a model train

stopped on a flimsy oval of rails

all waiting on the vagaries

of electric circuits in a little house

taxed to the limit by the chill

of winter air against the cracks

fuses blowing at the demands

of Christmas lights and electric oven

glowing just above the tracks

© 2015 Frank Kearns