Strip Mining Town

🏚️🏚️🏚️

Along the road to happy past time

And most sacred memory 

Is the peeling paint 

And shattered dreams 

The houses remain 

Cracked windows as sunken eyes 

With threadbare lashes 

Moth ridden and forlorn 

Trees dead and dry 

Against uncaring sky 

Parched earth of the fields 

Where sustenance once bloomed 

The chalky white hills 

Unnaturally steep 

And surreally straight 

Their brows curved as the scythe 

Asphalt cracked and bubbled 

By countless forgotten summers 

The teeth of the potholes glisten 

Hungry maws to devour 

Little broken fences 

Ring little graven gardens 

Not even a weed 

To bring a semblance of life 

But most ominous of all 

Is not the broken toys 

Left discarded by the roadside 

Or Sunday best still hung to dry 

It is the hungry cotton rock 

Stained red as blood from ancient iron 

That reaches and claws skyward 

From the silent dust 

Follow the highway and fly on past

The collapsed Baptist chapel

And the little cemetery 

Long without flower or flag 

You shake the dust as you leave 

Always to pass through and never to stay 

And close your ears to the insistence 

Of the hungry earth beneath the tires

You took my wealth 

Dwellers of earth 

My minerals and beauty 

But I will take you 

🪾🪾🪾