Glenwood Cemetery: Roots in the Clay

Lyrics

The air is different in here.
Thicker.
Smells of damp earth and time.
That Georgia red clay... it has a scent.
A memory.
Eighteen-sixty.
Before the cannons, before the smoke.
Someone drew a line around this hill.
Said, this is where the stories will end.
Where they will be kept.
Charles Murphey, you were one of the first.
A statesman laid in newly-turned soil.
Did you know you were planting a forest of names?
And the roots go down, deep in the clay.
Holding on to every yesterday.
Every whispered name, every chiseled date.
Under the ancient oaks, you just wait.
Glenwood, you hold it all.
The foundation, before the fall.
The red earth keeps the score.
Then came July. Eighteen sixty-four.
The air tasted of iron and powder.
No time for ceremony.
Just the hurried thud of shovels.
Lt. Colonel Richard F. Taylor,
brought here straight from the fighting.
A sudden debt paid to the ground.
The war, right here, underfoot.
And the roots go down, deep in the clay.
Holding on to every yesterday.
Every whispered name, every chiseled date.
Under the ancient oaks, you just wait.
Glenwood, you hold it all.
The foundation, and the fall.
The red earth keeps the score.
Mary Ann Harris Gay, you wrote it all down.
And then you came here to be written.
A final chapter in your own book.
But so many pages are blank.
The unmarked stones. The forgotten plots.
The children's graves with a smooth river stone,
left by a hand I'll never know.
This library has missing volumes.
So many silent voices.
The wind moves through the oaks.
A sound older than any name on these stones.
I feel the give of the ground beneath my feet.
Roots in the clay.
You're still holding them.
Still holding.