Some mornings rumble through

A weary mountain..a kind of train

Made from foreign steel and smokestacks 

Laced somehow with hope.

Roses emerging in the first whispers

Of dawn lean out like hungry

Lovers on the porch, they are

Fragrant as a first crush, as cautiously

Curious as pickpockets in a crowd.

You slowly hear yourself say that Neruda

Was right that ‘poetry is pure white’;

Yet you clamber back on the train,

Eyes closing as you and unseen others,

This motley adventurous flock,

Thrust further, deep, deeper into layers

Of impenetrable rock.