Badlands breeze
blows hard, blows mean
spitting time back in our faces
burying our dreams all over again
beneath oceans of dirt;
We waited for better days
that came and went,
while we were barely awake
ghosts of a hundred factories
ghosts of a million Tom Joads
marched into the long forgetting,
where places and names are tossed away
with the crumpled old maps
they were written on;
And the new geography
with their digital maps
don’t mean too much to anyone
their places and names are nowhere
anywhere near here,
Here the Badlands breeze
blows hard,blows mean
where all we inherit is
an empire of emptiness
a kingdom of sand.
The allusions take us back to Bruce Springsteen’s ”folk rock song”, ”The Ghost Of Tom Joad” and, of course ,to John Steinbeck’s great novel ”The Grapes of Wrath”, which introduces us to Tom Joad. However, the poem is an original,masterly presentation of a sense of irretrievable loss .
Your comments are greatly appreciated, thank you.
A poem of lament born from ruins probably caused by a storm or Badlands Breeze as the poet names it! Very well portrayed!