Toys Are Meant To Be Played With

Toys are meant to be played with

Not to be left in their box

Collected for years

By reverent hands

Until the toys within 

Are reduced to tears

With no one to play with

Mint in the box

Doesn't mean a thing

To an electric train and it's rolling stock

Built thirty years ago by Lionel

Shipped to a strip mall hobby shop

Put in the back room and forgot

Only to be found again

Two and a half decades later

To the delight of the purveyors

Of things still mint in their box

Inside a veritable nesting doll set of boxes

Outside is the shipping box

With the red Lionel logos

A stock number telling it's set secrets

About the contents unseen within

But only to those in the know

Who have the sheet to decipher this code

Next are the individual brown boxes

Seven of them to be exact

With more red Lionel logos

The same stock number

With added dash numbers

To differentiate the pieces

Still nothing to see except box stock brown

Now come the interesting boxes

The ones that we see on the shelves

In the old Lionel orange and white

A large cellophane window in the front

To finally show off what you get for your money

A tease for the masses and their cash

Waiting inside these

Now three layers deep

Is the Lionel Chicago and Alton locomotive

Number Six-Fifty-Nine

In it's regal burgundy and silver

With six matching passenger cars

Baggage and combo

Two coaches

One dining and at last the observation

All this toy

Awaiting small hands for so long

So I hope my father approved

Though he is seven years gone now

When I came down to his old train room

To find an open empty Lionel shipping box

Seven smaller brown empties

Along with opened display boxes

And a burgundy and silver passenger train

Running merrily around the tracks

With my son at the controls

He did always say

"Toys are meant to be played with"