Last Mother's Day This Train took me for a poetry moment!

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Re-running a post I loved from Last Mother's Day!
With some Sylvia lovely help!

Why Couldn't It Be Like This?

What would you want for Mom's day?

I have three great kids and my mom still here so I'm very fortunate. My daughter today offered help with either tweaking this blog to look a bit slicker or else building a new one, so that's kind of exciting. We are going to go see some music too. To celebrate this day of momming.

But what I'd like...maybe poems like I read a long time ago. There is a good one I'm admiring both for its form but also for it's terrific idea. I'd like to see this carried into life. It seems like it would be a wonderful thing to see in action. I often get stopped by rails here in Oxnard going to and from the port. So the thought of cars with word messages, that's fun.


A Project for Freight Trains

By David Young
(From the book "Zero Makes Me Hungry")

Sitting at crossings and waiting for freights to pass, we
have all noticed words-COTTON BELT / ERIE / BE
SPECIFIC-SAY UNION PACIFIC / SOUTHERN SERVES THE
SOUTH-going by. I propose to capitalize on this fact in
the following way:

All freight cars that have high solid sides-boxcars,
refrigerator cars, tank cars, hopper cars, cement cars-
should be painted one of eight attractive colors, and
have one large word printed on them:

1. Burnt orange freight cars with the word CLOUD
in olive drab.
2. Peagreen freight cars with the word STAR in
charcoal gray.
3. Rose-red freight cars with the word MEADOW
in salmon pink.
4. Glossy black freight cars with the word STEAM
in gold.
5. Peach-colored freight cars with the AIR
in royal blue.
6. Peach-colored freight cars with PORT
in forest green.
7. Lavender freight cars with the word GRASS in
vermilion or scarlet.
8. Swiss blue freight cars with the word RISING
in chocolate brown.

When this has been accomplished, freight cars should
continue to be used in the usual ways, so that the word
and color combination will be entirely random, and
unpredictable poems will roll across the landscape.

Freight cars without words (i.e., without high or solid
sides, such as flatcars, cattle cars, gondolas, automobile
transporters, etc.) should all be painted white, to em-
phasize their function as spaces in the poems. Ca-
booses can be this color too, with a large black dot, the
only punctuation.

Approximation of these random train poems can be
arrived at by using the numbers above, plus 9 and 0
for spaces, and combining serial numbers from dollar
bills, social security number, birth dates, and tele-
phone numbers. The 5-6 combination, which makes
AIRPORT, is to be considered a lucky omen. 2-6 may be
even luckier.


This project would need to be carried out over the en-
tire United States at once. Every five years a competition-
could be held among poets to see who can provide
the best set of colors and words for the next time.



Isn't that a good poem?
Happy Mom's Day.


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DAUGHTER EDIT:

Might be a bit presumptuous of me to go fiddling with someone else's blog, but thought my mum might get more of a kick out of this than a Mother's Day e-card.

Some poem illustrations (apologies for lousy JPEG images) in case you want to shuffle up your own train poems:










[Original train pictures from the graffiti coloring book by Fakeproject Corporation of America, free to be reproduced, distributed, and used by all aspiring graffiti artists.]