By the Wayside

By the Wayside

Sun stroked Alabama afternoon.

Cicadas buzz like stun guns,

air thick as Karo syrup.

The road crunches underfoot for miles.

A heat gauntlet.

No one lives here.

What would they do?

The wisps of long gone moonshiners, the shadows of rebel privateer ghosts,

the lilt of extinct  slave songs, the click of stray musket balls through woods,

gnaw like mice upon wooden awareness.

The looming spirits of Robert E. Lee and Martin Luther King, linked like adjoining giant hickories,

call from the forest.