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Ballad of the Lost
By Jim Stith


Lonesome are the streets,
Paved in dirt and asphalt
Eroded away to gutters
And gasoline rainbows.

Where once were children
Laughing in the park
There once was grass and weed
That choked aging equipment

The streets are now silent
Main above all
There rubble encases the earth
While mud and dirt encrust

The orange tank on the hill
Once beautiful in it’s day
Now a different kind of orange
As rust erodes its sides

The sky, a once beautiful sight
Filled with birds and noise
Now wrecked with pollution
It pained me to see it die

Then back in the day
The school imprisoned children
Now what is left is a shell
Which now encases their souls

The once white marker board
Hangs eerily by a corner
Once home of Dogie pride
The gymnasium is just a floor

The greenhouse by my home
Now rotted with decay
As vine and shrub crushed its glass
Vegetation had its revenge

The courthouse; our county seat
Lay a broken mass of marble
The blind justice once atop
Will see nevermore

Darkness chokes the neighborhoods
Once named Frontier and Grey
Are now dank and dusty
And resemble a junkyard

To look across the desolate landscape
Will bring a tear to your eye
As you see shadows of the past
Get sick, and then they die

That fateful day that commeth
Was thought a myth by all
Till that one day it came
The nuclear fireball

Great was the suffering
But greater was that of survivors
Not the task of burying the dead
But leaving their broken homes

The refinery ever churned
With harmful radiation
As the bodies of the stricken
Burned silently unto shadow

These sights no longer visible
Without a suit or barrier
Because of the protective dome
Made of concrete and lead block

Such as Chernobyl
A reactor near Kiev
The streets will never see the light
For a thousand years or so

Gone is the day when the flowers lived
Before the warhead took them away
The day exploded with light; a second sun rose
As people burned into shadows in the blink of an eye

Now lies a plaque mourning those that day
As the rest did vow revenge
On those who took our town
Our home, our lives away

Then began the campaign
The theater in the Orient
As superpowers flung nukes
Crippling the war machines

The Neocolonial wars
Broke into violence
But the ones who survived before
Drifted to quiet seclusion

Here we lie mourning the dead
Crying softly in the fallout shelter
To say a prayer and bow our heads
Then shun the heinous technology

We await the “Great Day”
When we can finally see
With ones own eyes
And not by fluorescent bulb

Waiting and brooding may be too long
We ourselves may never see the true sky
And to frolic in the green fields
But the children may see the wonders of my day

But only I know
I know to fear the “Great Day”
Knowing our children will not…
No! They cannot see the sky

The sky is scorched
Polluted beyond repair
As smoke and nuclear plume
Choke out the once-fresh air

They cannot frolic in the fields
Where machines of destruction lie
Because the ground is sterile
And nothing but charcoal

I wish our children wouldn’t see
The destruction of our race
That race that emptied the ocean
And burned the sweet sky

I like to think of simpler days
When life consisted of school
The carefree life of a child
Learning and playing all day

Fifty years later, I still remember those days
I mourn for the dead, I mourn for the living
They cannot know the joy I once knew
Their skin doesn’t know the touch of grass and dew

As for me I sit here
Stuck in this concrete hole
Today it is my protector
Tomorrow it will be my tomb
The End My Favorite Web sites

My Computer Apps web site
My web page design web site
A web page help site
Binary fun
The Lair of Metroid web site
My Created Hell
The Master Sword .com
Stickdeath
A Comic about retro videogames

Thank you come again!

Sara may enter