The corn is planted and that rain has come
and the river has done it's flooding
and receding. This isn't Huck Finn's river –
not the place of promises and dreams
not that boyhood freedom. There is no freedom now;
the corporate oligarchs have taken it
turned it into pre-career testing... gotta know,
don't ya know, what Slot B your A'll fit into...
the future of America is dependent on
all those tax dollars our kids will pay.
They may as well start chipping away
now.
A year ago this summer
two boys died who should not have
working a grain bin
they had no business working; but the old men
said they did it when they were young
and that's the problem with kids these days,
no backbone, no work ethic.
The corn is planted and growing
and the boys are planted, too.
But nothing grows on Bone Hill
but plastic flowers
and crab grass.
I hear the trains come through at night
and even now, the sound is still a comfort.
I love the sound of trains... some boyhood thing,
some dream I had once
of wearing a striped conductor's hat,
keeping time with a pocket watch
in the breast pocket of my overalls,
the miles of track stretching ahead and falling behind
relentless and forward. There aren't as many trains
as there were, and the interstates
have replaced the rail
and we are too busy
trying to make Exit 17
to slow down and see
the small towns slowing dying,
buried on Bone Hill
recorded in State Historical Society Notes,
and left to rot.
I dream of an America I have never seen,
one I recall in the songs of men wiser and more stalwart,
the memories of those who tell the stories
to keep that world alive. Miles and miles
of corn rows, miles of train track,
all disappearing like the small towns around them,
the histories locked away
in the forgotten back room
of a Carnegie Library Building
like some badly organized time capsule... after all,
if it ain't on Google, it ain't worth knowing.
A life unscanned and undigitized
is no life at all.
And the little that remains
is parceled out by angry old men
in the back rooms of dilapidated court houses...
decisions made to today, regretted tomorrow,
then forgotten in the name of expediency.
The memories lack resonance
and are not as important
as the price of corn,
the cost of fuel,
and the number of boys willing to work
so that some migrant won't get the job
and destroy our Way Of Life;
better 1000 dead children in grain bins
than one Mexican feeds his family.
Better 10,000 dead soldiers
than 536 out of work politicians.
I dream of an America
I have never seen; the one I first imagined
staring at the names of 52,000 dead men
on a marble wall in Washington D.C. I am told
the men died for me; I am told
students who marched off to war
are there for me. But I never asked them
to give up their childhoods. I never asked
for caskets draped in flags. I never asked
for Memorial Day cemeteries.
The corn is growing
but there are no young men in the fields,
only old men in large machines,
kicking up pesticide dust that kills honey bees.
I dream of an America I have never seen
and it is of thee I sing.