JOHNMICHAEL SIMON POETRY

Together yet apart they waited at the station

Mummy’s boy and Daddy’s girl

so alike yet so different

the curds and whey of their sour milk childhood

indispensably separating them from us and each other

like the twin gleaming tracks of the

railroad leaping out to the future

parallel yet never meeting they carry their

genetic traffic to an undisclosed horizon

 

He, taller thinner more serious

a brush wash of male femininity

spectacles often threatening to slip off his nose

when wrinkled into that self conscious apology of a smile

she, fuller of figure and matronly

yet still brandishing her father’s brusqueness

 

Together yet apart they boarded the train

spotlighted amidst the cattle trucked bewildered mob

by our nostalgia and horror

we the survivors

watched them depart

eyes fixed on the monstrous closing doors

five years later, fifty, five hundred

praying that no ash of time would ever

erase their uniqueness, their fragile joys