The evening trains went hooting by
the factories and the fields of wheat.
Harmonicas would lilt and sigh
songs such as “Путъ далек лежит”…
in the year of nineteen-forty-five,
in that year of first cigarettes,
when farms without a soul alive
gave hope—like red sunsets.
The evening trains made their way fast
to Prague and to new dizziness.
The weekend gone, I jumped a carriage
and left, the landscape rolling past.
Along the line of that express
youth fell away—a head of cabbage.
