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Contents Category: Poetry
Custom Article Title: Train to Leura
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Article Title: Train to Leura
Article Subtitle: by Vivian Smith
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The train to Leura early Sunday morning
and our compartment full of total strangers,
Russian-speaking hikers, boots and shorts,
and four Americans, I’d say, late sixties,
calling out the stations as they pass:
‘Melbourne was more interesting than this’,
‘The trees looked better across Portugal’,
‘I want to see a kangaroo today’.

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They tick the names off on their tourist map,
and every twenty minutes of our trip
‘I’ve still not seen a single kangaroo’.
I feel like saying and you will not see
a single emu now at Emu Plains,
but that would take me too long to explain.
I like these chatting couples, so relaxed:
they say exactly what they want to say,
they care, and do not care, they laugh out aloud.
‘I’ve still not seen a single kangaroo’,
the two behind them chomping on their snacks,
sliced carrots, polished Packham pears.

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