​POETRY  
          

"wheat-colored grass below, stark blue skies above."

                           Photo by Weebly                               

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All Aboard
by Charlene Anderson

We glide through flat, unending grasslands,
wheat-colored grass below, stark blue skies above.
I doze.     Wake.
The grassland has morphed into marshland,
the sky salted suddenly with swaths of iridescent clouds.

The train, zigzagging/winding in slow motion now,
swerves around a dusky slough on one side,
a bright, fragmented pool on the other.
Grass droops down and trails through the water.
Sunlight slaps across it—misfiring, flashing fire.
Water splashes up against the windows too,
harsh, sharp, cold. 

I pull back from the window and look around the car.
Some passengers slump down in their seats,
others stare vacantly ahead or at the floor.
So, even though the train is rustling them now, 
staccato sunlight is dancing off their eyes
and water spits at them,
they remain strangely inert. Startlingly still.

I consider rousing them— 
tap drooping shoulders, whisper into shut-down ears--
surely, they’d want to know what’s going on around them.
I start getting up, but shake my head, 
sit back down and look outside instead--
eyes again moving across the sun-sparked pools, 
through the restless grasses, 
and up into the spreckled, filamented sky.

I smile, laugh. And suddenly I see:
the world itself is shaking them, light-strafing them
and lobbing water at their seeming-sightless eyes.
And with the force of the entire natural world
on their case now,
I’ll be surprised if they don’t lurch awake 
and start turning towards the windows soon.
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Soon after she retired from UCSF, a friend told Charlene Anderson about OLLI at SF State and she began taking classes. In 2015, in one of those classes, Mike Lambert
suggested starting a literary and photography magazine at OLLI. So, Mike, Charlene and a small group of OLLI members, founded Vistas & Byways. It has been publishing
stories, poems and nonfiction pieces, as well as photography, ever since. Charlene is pleased to be part of V&B which provides OLLI members an opportunity to be
published.

Other works in this issue:
Poetry
​The Trouble With Time
Photo Essay
Mississippi: River Out of Time

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