Oh, Susquehanna!
Defiance, Ohio
The Great Depression

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We walk at the paths at the banks of the mighty Susquehanna
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with our feet made muddy by your tributaries that trickle their way to the Chesapeake. 
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It's like we follow I-83 down to harbor cities with strip malls and tar-mac
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people swirling and teeming. It seemed so exciting, but now it seems like such a blight.

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I grew up near Kentucky's Mt. Zion
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Road and all that was there was some old cemetery.
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All I wanted [was] to be able to walk to the store.
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Now I don't live there but there's too many stores, some apartments, and a Sunoco.
 
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And I wonder, what did they do with the bodies?
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Oh, Susquehanna!

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And I miss that place behind my house where I hiked and climbed and played
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where I ditched this noisy century or just hid out from the decade.
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M-I homes thought it could stand to be updated
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forced it all into a grid until it looked like the funny pages.

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With every trace of life, it seems, confined within a frame
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the faces move from day to day but the strips all look the same.
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And the punchlines are resoundingly unfunny
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for those trapped in this architecture of easy money.

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And it feels like this could all come to no good.
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The kids who populate these culdesacs will never know what stood beneath those
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cookie cutter houses: fields and streams and woods.
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They'll sit in cars and wait for mom to drive them out of this boring neighborhood.