A Way Station
(listen to the poem, read by Diane R. Wiener)
When she came off the waiting list, she said that this would be the second to last stop;
Now, at the nurses station, she perches, a tiny bird unbroken between those spoked wheels,
They remind me of the English Raleigh bicycle, which never appeared eight decades ago
Because the unspoken truth was that we couldn’t afford Christmas.
One day, her words were swept up by a force we can’t defeat,
Not obliterated as were her warnings by the screeching wheels of the street cars turning for Park from Boylston,
A futile detour,
A rerouted subway in Boston,
to save the Dutch elms,
where now, the oaks and maples stand,
Public shade for the homeless and aristocrat in these most public gardens.
One deep winter predawn,
Half way through the Lord’s Prayer,
“Give us this day, our daily bread,”
She signaled for the last stop,
I barely had time to ask her to forgive my trespasses,
Because, without detour or rerouting,
We had reached the final station.
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About the Author
Nick Racheotes is a product of the Boston public schools, Brandeis University, and Boston College, from which he holds a Ph.D. Retired from teaching at Framingham State University, he is professor emeritus of history. Racheotes is an associate of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard. He is working on a book-length study, Baptized Property: The Russian Orthodox Church and Serfdom. Of late, Racheotes and his research partner Maria Tolskaya have been engaged in bringing under-represented Russian poems to an English-speaking audience on academia.edu. Posted there are: The Exile Returns: “‘Grandpa’ (‘Dedushka’) by Nikolai Nekrasov, A Translation with Commentary” and “‘The Countryside’ by Alexander Pushkin, Translated with an Introduction by Nicholas S. Racheotes.” Racheotes hopes to complete another poetry offering, “Playing Life by Ear: Uncorrected Poems.” He and his wife, Pat, divide their time between Boston and Cape Cod.