"I Went, And I Am Still Going."

This is a re-post of "All Change at Zima Junction." This morning I turned in my keys after some forty years of herding cattle (metaphorically), seventeen of them with this institution. I am unemployed for the first time since I was five or so and was set to toddling out to the chicken yard every evening to gather the eggs in an old Easter basket. My mother said that the rooster often chased me and made me cry, but I don’t remember that. And now - what adventure does Aslan have next for me? The first book I bought upon returning home from Viet-Nam was the Penguin Modern European Poets paperback edition of Yevtushenko: Selected Poems. That 75-cent paperback from an airport bookstall in San Francisco is beside me on the desk as I write. All Change at Zima Junction For Yevgeny Yevtushenko, 1932-2017 Everyone changes trains at Zima Junction Changes lives; nineteen becomes twenty-one With hardly a pause for twenty and then Everyone asks you questions you can’t answer And then they say you’ve changed, and ignore you The small-town brief-case politician still Enthroned as if he were a committee - He asks you what you are doing back here And then you go away, on a different train: Everyone changes trains at Zima Junction “I went, and I am still going.”1 1Yevtushenko: Selected Poems. Penguin,1962

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