44 East

“Where are you going Dada?” Strongland asked.

"I don’t know… When you get older, sometimes, just go some way you’re not sure where it will take you.”

I slowed and turned right off the highway

A lazy bend drizzled over rolling folds of southern prairie

We’d never been down 44 East

Nothing more than chicken scratch in the dirt

At least that’s all the secret you are let in on

Like everything else, until you look for yourself

We left the car running

Stepped softly onto the ochre dust

Toward an abandoned school bus

Now part of the old reaching pine copse

Clustered

Like the last children that departed this decaying carcass of rust long ago

Not wanting to leave this part of their lives just yet

A relic of souls

You have to figure those children have grown old

Had children of their own

Passed on

Returned to the Alabama clay

Under the shadow of campaign signs for America’s next President

Red earth now

Not white

Not black

We picked wildflowers

Tucked them inside the cracked and ruined headlight clusters

An exchange of broken glass for shards of vibrant color

There is beauty to find, even in the discarded

Be the light where there once was but has faded

A lesson to carry at every turn

We cross to cotton fields

Dappled shocks of white

He pulls the dense, white fibers apart with gentle hands

I tell Strongland, “One day you’ll know the history of this plant”

It’s America

Grace and thorns

Blood from dark skinned women and men

Stained cotton

Holding steady under a bruised sky

Pierced by the boiling October sun

Promises of storms

Where will you go Strongland?

Where will you go, America?