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Another poem written during my recent stay in Chattanooga, TN.
Lights, Camera, Action!
this town is like a Hollywood set
look behind the storefronts
the buildings that line Broad Street
there’s nothing there
the bricks rise to the skies
joggers clot the river bridge
but the heart has been cut out
Walter Cronkite once said
this was the dirtiest town in America
it’s cleaner now – wiped clean of its history
all the people shunted out to the pavement
paradise, never far from a strip mall
there are historical markers
on every downtown street
they are little more than headstones
marking empty graves, the city’s corpse
long ago merged with the soil
covered with the dust of razed landmarks
“Right where Starbucks is, this is where
your granddaddy built tank engines
to fight the Nazis.”
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