ONLY TWENTY YEARS
Who can know the future of twenty years
And discount the dim offerings of Gateshead?
What 12 year old can imagine
The emptiness of prairies in Montana
Or smell from fifty miles away Russia’s boreal forest
Or feel the rocky fossils of Donegal
Resisting the Atlantic combers
Or standing on a windswept Gateshead corner
Can hear the beauty of old Quebec French
Or collecting coal pieces in cobbled streets of Teams
Can feel the blueness of flax fields in Alberta
And crossing the Tyne bridge
Can see over the Roebling bridge
On the Ohio at Cincinnati?
LEAVING CINCINNATI
Rumbling south over 1000 feet to freedom :
The Roebling bridge, and below,
Its Stars and Stripes hanging limp in the wind,
A tugboat slowly pushing
Sixteen blue-black coal barges,
Almost sinking in the waves.
Over the Kentucky line
Turn right onto I- 71 to Louisville,
Steel skeletons of bridges
Left behind in the rear view mirror.
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NOTE ........In the movie RAINMAN, Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman are excellently filmed crossing this bridge.
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