Highway Children

(note: for years I have tried to find the words to express what it means to live in America in the Twenty-first century, as if I were looking at our world from the outside. This is my latest effort. I hope it speaks.)

A thousand years from now,
They will come with spades
And dig our bones
And sift for what is left of us
And call us the highway people.

And they will say
That we were married to highway
As the Sumerians to Euphrates
Or the Hindi to the Ganges,
Or The Egyptians to the black snake Nile.

Forever pilgrims
Forever restless. forever strangers
Rushing in our metal boxes
Rushing nowhere going nowhere
Forever moving forever alone.

Gone are villages,
Gone are towns, Gone are cities
Where we lived in just one place.
Knew its contours and connections
Knew it as a home, now it is nothing
No more than an exit on the highway.

Gone are the places
Gone is the country where we were free
As trees along the roadside are free.
Free to draw our succor from the ground
Free to be a part of something greater.

Going, going gone we are
Now we are just tumbleweeds,
blowing along the highway
Obeying the orders of steel and stone
Under the protection of steel and stone

We are the children
The children of the forever highway
Drunk with freedom, restless and alone
Thirsting for novelty, for constant change
But nothing changes, Nothing is new
What is here is the same as what is there.

So we live and die
Along the concrete river
Where we live and are not seen
Where we die an are not remembered
Nothing is remembered
On the highway of forever.

A telephone line
Hosts a solitary raven
Watching the cars go by
Watches and waits
Watches and waits
As the traffic goes on forever.