Cross Country Train Trip (Image challenge), a random Pandora challenge no end date Options

[Cleo_Serapis]

While Pandora's been busy with Clerihews, Cybele talked me into adding another IMAGE for your musing of which she photographed on holiday. Why not have a go at this one?

Your task:
Write about the image below and include in your response:

Where you are going and why.
Make it more challenging and pick a bygone era.

Photograph © Grace Galton

Good luck! There is no announced end date for this challenge.

~Cleo and Cybele    

[Ephiny]

The responses to this beautiful picture are amazing!

Cathy, I loved your piece here, especially this last part

Out there in the harbor
stands a woman, faded grey;
torch in hand, raised up high
to promise freedom to all men.

I could just imagine the generations of tired, frightened people, gazing up at it for the first time..excellent :)

Here is one that this picture made me think of..from a few lines I scribbled on a train about two years ago.  It's a bit strange but long train journeys seem to have that effect, I think!!

Thoughts on a train

A pressurised, furious cold
in late January.
Spring circles and streaks past
in strange occasional orange light over
bulbs clinging grimly to hard ground.
Frost pulls a firm grasp.
Grey skies.
Grey faces.

Mothers fling frantic stimulation
at bored children, voices shrill
against fogged glass,
far off lights, wisps of smoke,
and stale scents of coffee.

A nun reads from The Tablet Catholic Weekly-
Life and Death Choices over Iraq.
She hasn't turned the page for over an hour
and I have read the
upside down
paragraph over and over and over and
can't make up my mind either.
At times her eyes glaze over into
a sleepy, mild obscurity.
I cannot read her.
It is one of those days.
Nothing is real and she dozes gently into my thoughts.
Our eyes meet.
I look away first.

She gives up and turns the page at Athlone station,
Approaches to Unity.
This interests her more and she adjusts her glasses.
I remain with Iraq; she has disappointed me.
It floats around my mind with
music on my cd player, an aching tune,

Miserere Nobis, dona nobis pacem

Plea for peace.

It makes the afternoon golden suddenly,
crystallises tears and ends
on a mixture of sixty six versions of the chord C.
Its echo lasts.

Nothing makes sense.

The future drifts ahead but I want to stay
here in the dry air,
hidden, too and hooded,
a fixed gaze outwards.
I want this same blinkered belief.
Colour hurts.
Skin itches and jumps, somewhere
a heart thuds and pulls out air.
Too fast.

Feet tap, she stirs now. Wary glance.
I want to sit here and refuse to move.
until someone comes to pull me
out of my head,
piece by piece.
I get up and walk, like her I have a purpose
I am trying to find.
The mist thickens.
Steam drifts with no breeze to guide it.

She straightens, stretches tired legs into my vacated space.
I wonder what conclusions she drew.
She certainly mixed up mine.