RUBBLE
by Steven W. Baker
The street by my house is made of rubble
Mortar and brick dumped against the rain
Discarded pieces of broken ceramic tile
Lumpy detritus bridging muddy puddles
Someone’s dreams once built now gone.
In dry weather the ubiquitous brick walls
That line even the most impoverished road
To keep out the reason for their existence
Form wind tunnels for dust storms
To sweep dirt and trash to new locations.
A small herd of dairy cows wanders by
As if they belong here in the smoky city
Their lovely eyes showing little interest
In the road that leads from grass to milking
They’re just on the way to their fate.
Horse carts, school children heading home
Gardeners on bicycles with their lawnmowers
Maids walking efficiently to beat the setting sun
Lonely taxi drivers heading to their next fares
All stir dogs beyond gates to rouse from naps.
In the future (how easily we assume)
This lazy ersatz street will finally be completed
Men will come in trucks and dump real gravel
Then neatly put down six-sided paving stones
And civilization will come bustling by my window.
Everything will be transformed as if by magic
But I will know what lies beneath the thin veneer
I will remember the dust and the bricks and tile
The horses and cows that are no longer allowed
The reason why everything always has to change.
I won’t forget either how my life has moved on
Built atop losses I never wanted to endure
Past the dreams I fought to keep alive
The beloved people who shared my path
For far too few a breath we held together.
When my street is all paved but is broken
The men will come again in their big trucks
To dig down into the hidden dusty layers
Of the rubble on which the present will be built
And know that what is lost can still sustain.
©2015 Steven W. Baker
PHOTOGRAPH: “A Dirt Road Winds Toward Sajama” (the highest mountain in Bolivia) by Joel Sartore. Prints available at fineartamerica.com.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Steven W, Baker has lived (at least six months) in Greencastle, Indiana; W. Lafayette, Indiana; Bloomington, Indiana; Ft. Wayne, Indiana; Indianapolis, Indiana; Cedar Lake, Indiana; Crown Point, Indiana; Chicago, Illinois; Morris, Illinois; St. Joseph, Michigan; Grand Rapids, Michigan; Chillicothe, Ohio; Portland, Maine; Salem, Massachusetts; Providence, Rhode Island; Clarksville, Tennessee; Sarasota, Florida; Orlando, Florida; Phoenix, Arizona; Hamilton, Montana; Niagara Falls, New York; Toronto, Canada; Mexico City, Mexico; Jakarta, Indonesia; San Juan, Puerto Rico; Ponce, Puerto Rico; Marigot Bay, St. Lucia; on a sailboat in the Caribbean; London, England; Guangzhou, China; and Santa Cruz, Bolivia, where he currently resides with his lovely Bolivian wife. He has also traveled extensively around the world. He has been writing almost all his life, having written his first of four novels, The Yuma Cave Mystery, when he was in the eighth grade. He has never tried to get a novel published . . . maybe someday. He is not a big fan of self-publishing. He has a BA and MA in English and studied creative writing under poet Felix Stefanile at Purdue University. He has essentially lived two lives as a poet — as a young man in college and shortly after when he published a lot of work in underground newspapers and obscure journals, most of which are probably now defunct. His second life as a poet began a quarter century later, after his divorce from his first wife. He has now gathered a large body of unpublished work from this period that was written for himself and his close friends, but his first book from all that will be coming out this summer, Sun and Moon, which gathers 61 poems, some of which are rather long.
Silver Birch Press 