Tracking the Past

Tracks stretch across barren winter fields yet their steel trace like a snail's trail appears polished, glinting in dying light, stifling your breath, towards a dark shed doors creak like a sprinter's graveled gasp. However, birds don't sing above the stretched tram lines, you cannot speak in jolting cattle wagons, screeching their approach fingers like frantic worms drilling between their wooden slats. Then doors release the cargo then funnels into iron holding pens in quick-step lines each is tagged prodded into wooden sheds you're now in narrow single beds tettering on sharp edges lurking behind screens. Pressing, your warm flesh on windows iced, watch the blackbirds gathering, as neatly labeled gas canisters haze like mustard seed clouded in emerald mold. Peppered panes dusted by mottled-ash, steamed by your breath, shuddering into deeper tones. Clutching in Cumbrian wrestler grasp your herded panic reverberates. The rolling cloud cloaks the silent sleeping earth. Our final clench is warm flesh on flesh