Union Station

echoing through the vast openness
the sound of travel
of waiting and arrival
of parting and reunion
recalls, nostalgically,
a day past,
when (our cultural memory,
having forgotten
greater and lesser depressions
and the tenuous bridge wrought of
handwritten letters
spanned great train-distances,
tells us)
things were great

union station, whatever city
has no equal
the vast expanse of
patterned floors and carved walls
of marble and limestone
belie much of the
deep-felt, yet often-shattered, hope
carried through the lobby,
heavier than the luggage

though, perhaps,
through the great sorrow
found in vast emptiness,
populated though it may be,
a gospel train still comes
to track us from death to new life