On the broken street,
where even passing cars cannot
erase the growing weeds
slowly widening asphalt cracks
before the gap-toothed leer
of empty storefronts
everything is grey,
thick dust of old abandonment
hanging acrid in the air,
rusted sewer drains
choked with hardened mud
split like gaping idiot grins

where buildings are now ruins,
floors and ceilings sag
as children's toys rot slowly into
dull opaque paste of remnant lives;
no old laughter's left behind
to haunt dead bitter places
people once called home,
and wastes once manicured
as gardens and neat lawns
now collect old garbage blown
by cold thin winds from other places,
dreary cobwebs snaring
plastic bottle insects
and styrofoam shells of
old fast food containers,
dead skins sloughed from
unrelenting profit.

Between derelicts
lies a narrow defile
shadowed by aging brick
and rotting clapboard,
a mouth of broken boards
and shuttered windows,
a gullet dark with age
and tired filth,
filled with
acid smell of piss and
moldering lives that rots
before dead stacks of
steelworks abandoned,
rising up behind
the devastation.

Through thick dank heat
and hanging dust of death
gloom shuts out
all thoughts of living,
ideas of life crushed down
by slow trudge through
long narrowing way,
where closing walls
loom overhead,
brushing arms and shoulders
with death's detrious:
rotten wood and moldy brick dust,
dried weeds and dead insects,
all become a tunnel
sheathed with hopelessness,
smothered with despair.

Yet even here there is an end,
an exit from the devastation,
a gleam of narrow pale sunshine
widening with nearness
until despair is left behind,
forgotten in a blaze
of blinding sunlight
banishing all dark.

The space beyond is wide,
freshened by a cool breeze
blowing gentle from
the unseen inland sea.

The sun is warm, the sky
inverted ocean,
and steel mills
lined up upon each side are sleeping,
blood-red with rusted iron,
their metal walls torn open
by time and dereliction,
revealing guts of ancient piping,
coal hoppers and old furnaces
forgotten and now cold.

An ancient dock runs down the center
half-filled by wind-blown sand,
black water still as mirror
where squat ships
once brought coal and iron
now sipped by swooping martins
nesting in abandoned buildings,
dark water rippling now,
swathed with water lilies,
white jewels on the black,
wide pads that match
the emerald of ivy
and virginia creeper
climbing broken walls
on either side
to wreath worn dry-blood lips
of gaping dark interiors
with life so deep and green
it hurts the heart,

and gravel road is covered now
with lupines spired tall
against the rise of coneflowers
and brown susans on both sides,
waves of yellow, blue and bright purple
through stands of prarie grass
rippling in cool breeze,
dotted with bright pink of wild roses
and golden sand becoming dunes
blown in new by winter storm
against the death of commerce
to overtake abandonment
and cover it with life,

where in place of death
trees rise again,
cottonwoods and willows
with roots half in the water,
ash and oak grown new
and strong from bleakness,
wild plums that stain the ground beneath
with purple bruises,

and at the very center,
in black water framed
by death of human progress
and new flower, branch and leaf
a tall bird stands with arching neck,
long bill the yellow of bright gold,
a white crane brilliant in the sunshine
oblivious to all while
hunting frogs and tiny fish,

and this is proof
beyond nightmares
of so-called progress,
that even when we break The Earth,
covering Her bleeding bones
with avarice and short-term profit
The Lady is not dead, She has not gone,
She is only timeless,
waiting patiently for moments
when long lingering destruction
gives way to unrelenting life
and quiet joy returns once more
to fill this pagan soul.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKx4jifHzko