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
May 6, 2019
May 6, 2019 at 4:10 PM UTC
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
Your ‘umble scrivener’s site is:
Reactionarydrivel.blogspot.com.
It’s not at all reactionary, tho’ it might be drivel.
Lawrence Hall’s vanity publications are available on amazon.com as Kindle and on bits of dead tree: The Road to Magdalena, Paleo-Hippies at Work and Play, Lady with a Dead Turtle, Don’t Forget Your Shoes and Grapes, Coffee and a Dead Alligator to Go, and Dispatches from the Colonial Office.