September 2013
Poetry
The Hauling
by Rob Lewis
Rob Lewis is a house painter and poet living in Fairhaven. He crafts words for the wordless in the hopes of bringing greater human understanding of and empathy for the not human.
by Rob Lewis
They are pushing the trains harder now
like profiteers in a time of war.
You can watch the dark loads passing
mounded like graves, in chained procession.
There is a bad tremble in the town.
If you tilt your ear to the warnings
if you peer through actual atmosphere
you will see the white flanks of glaciers
melting into the dark heaps.
You will spy charred stumps and branches
sticking out like animal bones.
You will hear holes tearing open in the sky
where songbirds are flying into extinction.
They are pushing the trains harder now
as if by redundancy they can attain normality:
becoming landscape, becoming landscape, becoming landscape. . .
“Growth” they insist
as the iron mechanics
of future holocaust
clatter by us toward the fires.
“Freedom” they whisper
as the invisible ash
of absence
falls around our houses.
