One day as I walked along a trail
I saw in the distance a man very pale
Who was swinging a hammer up and down
In an arc from the midair to the ground.
His posture had changed from the norm
The years of work had warped his form.
I questioned the purpose of his swing
And pondered the sound of familiar cling
That sounded with the fall of the hammer
Swung by the man of unusual manner.

He continued to swing in familiar rhythm
Like the swing of a clock pendulum.
Again and again he swung at the dirt
By the time I reached him, my head hurt
From the man’s repetitive pound
Of the hammer on the ground.

His clothes were dark and stained
By the works that had much pained
The man who’s gnarled gait
Was the most obvious of his traits.
His hat tilted down over his face,
The sun his visage would never trace.
Grey was the beard that ran down his chest,
Covering the clothes over his breast,
Clear down to his stomach’s place
The winding beard itself did trace.
“What are you doing,” I inquired.
His voice cracked from a tone retired.
“What I have always done,” he said
“The thing I will do until I am dead.”
With this, he paid me no more heed,
Nothing more could my questions read.

He pounded railroad spikes in sand,
Like a machine from an industrial land.
The same advance he would apply,
Until the day that he would die.

The First Trackpuller

There is a sensation called déjà vu
Certainly it will sometime affect you
And on this day it affected me
When on the horizon a figure I see
Reminds me of a man I had just met.
Down the road I had quickly fled
The man who would work until he was dead.
Now it seemed I would soon return
To a man my nature could only spurn.
Upon arrival though, I noticed difference
In this new trackman’s countenance.
His beard was long and grey as well
But his movement a different story did tell.
Rather than laying the track in the earth,
He was uplifting track of the others birth.
I did not even stop my pace to talk;
Away from the madness I would rather walk,
Lest I myself become infected,
The thought of which I rejected.