A Visit To The Small Town Cemetary
The tomb stones were dusty gray and evocative.
'The Coal vein gave out and left us with dust.'
'Our town was boom, bust and bust.'
'The new high-way passed us by'
'The drought killed the crops and prosperity for us.'
'Our kids went to the city abandoning us'
'The capitalists sucked us dry.'
'Nafta took everything we had left'
'The plant closed and we got unemployment'
Agribusiness bought all the land and put in condos'
'We lost out to development'
'The banks stopped making us loans for seed and equipment.'
'The river got polluted and the tourists stopped'
Spectures of pioneer ghosts and generations past
confronted me asking
'What have you done?
We died here for this land
now it is all gone?
We carried water from the river bank
for the house and the live stock;
built the gables from board planks
and imported cedar;
Carried great grandmothers piano
by wagon-train from across the sea;
eight thousand miles to hear our children play and sing
of future hopes and dreams.
Our town is map-less memory now
gone with the next consensus
entombed in photographs sepia
in immigrant notes and letters;
Indians and Negroes,
Irish and Italians
Latvians and Poles.
Swedish and Norwegian hard scrabble
French fishermen
[...] Read more
poem by Lonnie Hicks
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