Today's prompts from Write Better Poetry and NaPoWriMo: (1) Write a "set" poem (using any definition of the word you choose), and (2) " write your own poem that recounts a memory of a beloved relative, and something they did that echoes through your thoughts today."
Did you know that there are over 400 definitions of the word "set" in English? The OED has over 20 pages listing the definitions of that one word. No other English word had more definitions. I believe I once wrote a poem about that, using the word in about 30-plus different ways. I'll have to sort through my body of work to find it.
Anyway, I thought of "train set," which inspired this poem. Interestingly, it could also fit yesterday's theme of "home."
Little Woodbury
I used to dabble in model railroads,
as did my father, and his father before him.
Grandpop had a set of the original Lionels,
solidly made, not an ounce of plastic on them.
He ran the steam locomotive with its loud whistle
and real smoke pouring from its smokestack,
competing with Grandpop’s own pipe.
It pulled a caravan of box cars, coal cars,
cattle cars, gondolas, even passenger cars,
and last but not least, a caboose.
The train traversed a large oval, chugging over a trestle bridge
and through a tunnel in a papier-mâché mountain,
then circled a little village that looked like his hometown.
In fact, he built scale models of the buildings of Woodbury
from cardboard, balsa wood and paint—
the city hall, the hospital, the Methodist church,
the movie theater, advertising The Wizard of Oz,
including his own, a three-bedroom bungalow
he shared with my grandmother, flanked by two
large cedar trees, just a block from the real-life
train station, also represented on his layout.
The town was populated with little ceramic people
and 1930s-style die-cast Fords and Chevys.
I’d spend hours watching that Lionel logging scale miles
around and around little Woodbury, and sometimes
he let me take the controls. Once I asked him,
“Why do so many train sets have oval tracks?”
And he answered, “Because no matter how far you travel,
you always come back home.”
I used to dabble in model railroads,
as did my father, and his father before him.
Grandpop had a set of the original Lionels,
solidly made, not an ounce of plastic on them.
He ran the steam locomotive with its loud whistle
and real smoke pouring from its smokestack,
competing with Grandpop’s own pipe.
It pulled a caravan of box cars, coal cars,
cattle cars, gondolas, even passenger cars,
and last but not least, a caboose.
The train traversed a large oval, chugging over a trestle bridge
and through a tunnel in a papier-mâché mountain,
then circled a little village that looked like his hometown.
In fact, he built scale models of the buildings of Woodbury
from cardboard, balsa wood and paint—
the city hall, the hospital, the Methodist church,
the movie theater, advertising The Wizard of Oz,
including his own, a three-bedroom bungalow
he shared with my grandmother, flanked by two
large cedar trees, just a block from the real-life
train station, also represented on his layout.
The town was populated with little ceramic people
and 1930s-style die-cast Fords and Chevys.
I’d spend hours watching that Lionel logging scale miles
around and around little Woodbury, and sometimes
he let me take the controls. Once I asked him,
“Why do so many train sets have oval tracks?”
And he answered, “Because no matter how far you travel,
you always come back home.”
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