Where the Rails Forgot to Run

Once, a train passed through here.

Its whistle cut the silence of the woods,

and iron rails carved certainty into earth’s wild skin.

Passengers leaned into dreams as steel devoured distance,

never wondering if the forest minded.

But time,

that patient sculptor,

let silence gather where thunder once ran.

And trees those quiet rebels

grew not beside the tracks,

but through them.

Roots cracked iron like old promises.

Trunks wrapped the rails in slow defiance.

Leaves, like whispers, fell over memories

until the path forgot its purpose.

Now, the track holds no train

only stories.

Perhaps a man once stood here,

holding a letter he never sent.

Perhaps a girl waved goodbye,

not knowing it was forever.

Perhaps the forest, even then,

was listening.

And so it grew.

It swallowed the past

like grief buried under years of leaves.

If you stand here now,

listen.

Not for a train,

but for what the silence has learned to say.

For this is no longer a railway

It is a scar healed into a poem,

where nature wrote its final word

across man’s unfinished sentence.