Long Poems
Page Menu: Click the links in the table below to go to each poem.
Prologue
In this poetry collection, long poems are really not a genre, but an arbitrary way to categorize poems that somehow become “long poems.” It could be argued that one or two pages at the most, should be sufficient to intellectually and rationally reveal and reflect and resolve an idea poetically. A writer usually knows when setting out to write a short story versus a novel, though many short stories have turned into novels when the writer discovered there was more story to be told than imagined. Possibly some long poems could be a short essay or a short story. These long poems are gathered here to warn the reader that this is not a typical one page what-do-you-have-to-say-and-say-it piece. If patience and interest are achieved, the reader may peruse one or more of these poems.
Including a long poem among many other poems of more reasonable length, can break the readers rhythm. Long poems, for me and possibly other poets, just happen. It is usually not planned to write a long poem, and it is often surprising to the writer when completed. If necessary and if it feels right, be prepared to skip the long poems at this time until you are in a “long poem mood.” That mood may require a cup of coffee or more placid and patient state of mind.
There are some rather long poems in this collection that are not organized in this section, because for reasons that possibly can be explained or possibly not rationally explained, it seemed to be a “good fit” to put them in those other sections at the time.
The World Is a Dangerous Place
The world is a dangerous place
The hand eye coordination
Of logic and common sense
Is all the dexterity required
To figure one’s chances
And of one’s odds of survival
We are all forewarned to
Make careful definition
As we survey the risks
The chances are not good!
Unheralded meteors piercing through light years
Of space and matter and dark matter
May penetrate earth’s gravity
Sending human kind
And all of the rest of the kinds
The way of the dinosaurs.
Statistics formed from faceless databases
Indicate frightening facts
Of our collective and imminent decimation
From cancer in all its heinous forms
Not wearing seat belts
Obesity and high blood pressure and improper use of drugs
And doctors though enjoined to do no harm
Sometimes carelessly do harm
By what they do or don’t do
The world is a dangerous world.
Gather your own statistics
Clip newspapers and magazines articles
Search the web
Look around you with a more curious eye
Join a chat group or scan a blog
Form or join a support group
You will find pervasive statistics
Or you can manufacture statistics to support
Whatever notions you nurture
There are statistics both pro and con
For any hypothesis or belief
Write your congressperson and send statistics
Or better write your congressperson
To ask for statistics
The world is a dangerous place.
How many of us are unloving or unloved
Emotionally decimating the heart
Clogging arteries
Making mush of the gray stuff
Between our ears
Betraying our own bodies
With horrendous living and eating choices
Indifferently and relentlessly
Camouflaging feelings
That short circuit our loves and lives
The world is a dangerous place.
Wars that once had a numbered chronology
Now seamlessly run together
We must wonder
What bureaucracy lost the commitment of numbering
Our wars with more discipline
If we had been more astute
In our chronological definitions
The Korean War would not be so forgotten
And rightly received a much-deserved war number
Such as Cold War I
Consider the endless civil wars
In countries we can hardly locate on a map
In Africa and the Middle East
Hundreds are maimed and die
How many zeroes
Shall be added to the count
Of the many disavowed dismembered disheartened
Dislocated disengaged disenfranchised disenchanted
And all the other dis’s
Wars getting no more than back page news coverage.
The world is a dangerous place.
One third of the world goes to bed hungry
Or possibly it is one quarter
And one quarter do not have clean drinking water
Or possibly it is one third
Statistics and statistics and more statistics
And one quarter have no access to medical care.
Will the reality of the metrics make the quantification
More or less significant
Will the people who ARE the statistics feel any different
Whatever the numbers
The metrics are large and repulsive and staggering
What is ten million here or another ten million there
No matter
It is only a statistic
We solicit others to inform us with more macro statistics
The percentages are abstract and can provide some uncertainty
They are in the “ballpark” numbers
But it can be a bitch being a subset of a statistic
Depending if you are in or out of the ballpark
The world is a dangerous place.
We are fishing out the oceans
So big fish are now challenged to find small fish
And small fish to find smaller fish
We should be fearful we will stifle their competitive spirit
Will the lack of challenge make the fillets less tasty
Burning the forests with little concern or
And no concern or trepidation where the butterflies will go
And whether the next permutation of orchids
Will hit an ecological stone wall.
The world is a dangerous place.
A history that has produced Da Vinci
Mozart and Einstein and Babe Ruth
Also produces rascals and murderers and rapists and swindlers
Robbers and tyrants and demagogues and horse thieves
Yes-- there are still horses to be thieved
However most first world countries have replaced horse thieves
With car thieves
All of this is part of the progress of civilization
Stock manipulators and shoplifters and DUI ’s
There is road rage and sports rage and rage rage
All kinds of unfettered rage
Etcetera etcetera etcetera etcetera
The world is a dangerous place.
How fickle to define an endless list of inhumanities
With a few powerful etcetera’s
While millions may suffer
Within the confines of the etcetera
Rage has become a powerful noun
Searching for new adjectives
Will we one day have kindergarten rage
Bible study rage and hospice rage
Humanitarian rage
The world is a dangerous place.
A seamless sky
Tiptoes across a string of uneven pines
The sun pierces an apple tree
And its speckled shadows pock-a-dot
The sweet-smelling grass with traces of dew
Summer apples suckle on bending limbs
A child reaches tenuously for an apple
A bird watches curiously
A butterfly genuflecting at the base of tree
Lands with certain precision on a flower
A mother peers closely at her child
Replicating the love of a thousand generations of humanity
An act of kindness is generously offered
With no expectation of appreciation except
The benefactor is the patron of a good deed.
The world is engulfed in so much possibility and hope
And optimism and potential and faith
Amidst the reality that
The world is a dangerous place.
Journey to the Library
I walk the cool silent symmetric library aisles
Of sentineled books
Dewey decimal-ed in rational chronology
Of human knowledge
I am distracted by a book cover or title
And my staccato walk takes me
Haphazardly with unplanned curiosity
Meandering the aisles
Passing signs announcing humor
And poetry and art and travel and business
Easily tempted numerous times to falter
And linger a while.
Stumbling with a quick glance through philosophy
Sideswiping travel
My curiosity radar is locked on and GPS’d
To the first shelf
Of the first aisle of biography
A cacophony of voices dead and alive
Call out silently but seductively:
“wait, stay a while, browse, linger”
Their call is enticing.
There are those biographed individuals now still living
Celebrated and/or berated in print
Who have pursued their own introspection of an autobiography?
And others enjoying the retrospection of biography
Some may endure untimely deaths
Ad their lives once again evaluated and appraised
Against the backdrop of their demise.
Randomly I search the solitude of the aisles
Seeking the first and last shelf of the biographies
Alphabetically bounded and defined by
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar advertising his “giant steps”
And beating out a host of Adams’s
While on the last shelf
Stands Don Zimmer with his neckless pudgy face peeking from the cover
Hawking “a baseball life”
Two athletes acting as biographical goal posts
For the famous and infamous.
I shuffle down other seamless aisles
Engaging my head right and then left
Searching without discipline the book spines
With familiar names and those unknown
Real or imagined my neck creaks
Magnified by the special stillness of library silence
As books salaciously call me to look here
Or stop there
Uncertain of my wandering interests
Enticing me to make a solitary choice.
Book covers are eye searched and hand searched
For some enticing patina or gloss
For their newness or their venerable occupation of a shelf
For some subjective enticement or touch
Possibly a dog-eared cover advertising
And bragging of its endurance and interest
Touched a thousand times
Coffee stained
Thread bare
Scanned a thousand times and more.
More names are searched for their familiarity
While others are enticingly unknown
Arousing wonder and curiosity
Books stand at attention and announce
The saintly and the heinous
The lauded and the loathed
The great and the failures.
There is Harry Truman
A strange bedfellow
Rubbing shoulders with Donald Trump
George Patton spine to spine with St. Patrick
Sharing distant centuries of Irish heritage
Mother Teresa riding into eternity
Arm in arm with
Shirley Temple and Studs Terkle
Lincoln holding hands with Charles Lindbergh
Two long lanky heroes
Sharing the first three letters of their names
Jackie Gleason and John Glenn shoulder to shoulder
One reminding us of: Pow! Right to the moon Alice
The other initiating the early venture into space.
U. S. Grant and Sammy “The Bull” Galvano
Years and lifestyles apart
Gandhi and Greta Garbo
Castro and Catherine the Great
All are alphabetically correct
But often strange bedfellows
In this biographical graveyard.
There is Hitler pressing flesh
With Alfred Hitchcock
Alfred’s puckered lower lip seeming to scowl
In distaste at his biographical neighbor
On Hitler’s other flank is Edward Hoagland
Unknown to me,
His book “Compass Points” provides
A bare-knuckled view of the world
I touch the cool plastic Hoagland cover
I like his face
Which now looks into my armpit
Waiting to be bar coded out of the library.
There is Nixon looking cautiously at his neighbor
David Niven who encompasses his life philosophically titled
“The Moon’s a Balloon”
Should Nixon have written “Watergate’s a Balloon”
We can only wonder
Did they meet as they zigged and zagged through their lives?
Would they speak had they met
Do they now.
There is a small delicate volume
Of Saint Francis of Assisi inviting quiet reflection
Walking under Umbrian skies
Enticing us to gain insights
Into preaching the gospel of love
The joy of preaching to birds
To animals and people
With equal enthusiasm and dedication and commitment
And maybe more success with animals
Impetuously Saint Francis is selected
And now shares an armpit with Hoagland
My hands are free to touch and explore
And wander as impetuously as my mind.
Now these notable people
Living their extended lives in books
We must wonder
Does Einstein speculate
What happens when two people
From different points in space
Observe a train traveling at the speed of light
Does Michelangelo stretch his aching back
And yell down from the Sistine scaffolds for “more paint”
Does Hitler speculate if he had more tanks
Or more planes the results would be different
The bastard!
He probably would think that thought.
Possibly the books of great lives should be organized
Into some non-alphabetized chronology
Categorized by saints and sinners
Organized by famous and infamous
Cataloged by who is in heaven and who is in hell
By someone’s judgement
Consider nationality or sex or whatever
But who would make the rules
How would we know who is in heaven or hell
A random thought with little rationale
Forget about it
Leave them alphabetically!
Books marching in tandem
Joining hands cover to cover
Spine to spine
Feeling self-esteem for the earned right to be here
Performing in the archives of man’s
Record of who came this way.
Here is Guttenberg
Certainly if anyone deserves a book
The Steve Jobs and Bill Gates of the fifteenth century
Enjoying the benefits of his clever mechanization
He was profoundly high tech in the middle ages
Preceding those first dot coms by centuries.
One can imagine
When the last library light switches are flipped
And the library is put to sleep
The air condition throttles down
Its electronic pulse stifled to a half moan
Those whose lives earned their way here
Sit in quiet solitude
Looking into the eye of eternity
Some with more or less certainty
Or more or less shame or pride
Considering whether new appraisals
Will redeem their lives if not their souls
And new assessments reveal or hide blemishes
And now resolved accomplishments
Retelling their stories with more or less compassion
Than previous interpreters of their lives
As they sit silent and at attention
On the boundless shelves
In the quiet of the library.
The Bedford View
View from Bedford, New York
As slowly their rims find definition
From the light cascading to the upper sky
From a sun yet to find the cusp
Of the peaks of the distant hills
One can feel the warmth and promise
Of the sun before it reveals itself.
The sky transforms precipitously
Into muslin sheets of tarnished white
The hunchbacked hills
Like rows of waves
Separate and define pristine valleys
Now awash in bellowed strips
Of early morning fog
Like ruffled bolts of Chinese linen.
The first rays of sun appear to hold their breath
For a brief silent moment
Creating a crescendo of silence
As a muted world waits in anticipation.
With a choreographed itinerary
The sun marches above the crest of mountains
Reaching out with supple beams of sunshine
Bouncing off the eastern hills
And one solitary sunbeam
Catches the top of an outstretched tree
Creating a prismatic sunburst of light.
Large trees like sentinels
Frame the view in unequal halves
Hues of soft purples and muted reds
And tinges of lush sienna’s
As eclectic and brilliant as a van Gogh palette
Transforming the morning vista.
The sun bathes the hills in newborn light
As once dark mountains melt away
Revealing broad sheathes of forests
The hills transform into permutations
Of transitioning shades of green
With occasional splashes of verdant tilled fields
Identifying a sleeping farm and silent fairways.
The Full circumference of the sun balances
On the tip of the highest summit
One can motion
With an outstretched arm and the cup of the hand
Hold the sun in a gentle grasp
Before it hurdles into the sky
Defying cosmic physics
As outrageously as Galileo’s proclaimed new universe.
Curiously inspects a green acorn
Pirouettes on a limb with certain agility and confidence
Contemplating the discovered treasure
A solitary bird recites morning vespers
Echoed by a chorus of competing medleys
Proclaiming myriad morning overtures.
A doting butterfly interrogates and anoints
Zinnias and day lilies and begonias
And purple headed sedum
A bee hopscotches impatiently
Proclaiming dominion over fields of nectar
A persistent hawk carves long solid circles
Through silent currents of air
Descending on patient hushed wings
Searching for an unsuspecting quarry.
Surrounded and abutted by venerable stone walls
Contoured fields of hay
Recently scythed
By the long sharp fingers of a tractor
Creating furrows of now prostate hay
Now baptized by morning dew and mist
And bleached by all the yesterday’s sun
Into shades of ashy beige
And deliciously scenting the morning air
With delectable musty and earthy aromas.
The morning revelation
With surprising diversity is now a kaleidoscope
Of mountain and sky and field and life
Imposing an unspoken smile on one’s face
A slight morning breeze whispers
Chanting a half-spoken mantra
As its whiffs of air finger and tickle leaves
Gently nudging airborne bees and butterflies
On to new and unchartered courses
Colors blend and dissolve into each other
As if in collaboration with God and Monet
Rendering their colorful sleight of hand
Filling one’s head with unspoken gratifying thoughts
But incapable of describing
This Bedford view.
The World Is a Better Place
(Remembrance Austin “Aukie” Harney)
The world is never the same for every life lived
The imprint of your life
Has touched people and places and events
And for your journey
The world is a better place.
The hallmark of your love and friendship
Imbedded and tattooed in the souls
Of many who have crossed your path
Broken bread with you
Shared mutual efforts
At tasks and duty and play
You have given cause for people
To remember your kindness
And your keen and thoughtful eye
Your perceptive and attentive facility
For listening well
You offered more than you reaped
And for that
The world is a better place.
You taught your sons the traditional way
By the constancy and predictability
Of your role model and character
When your sons were confronted
With errant winds and
Roads chosen with less than certain care
You offered a firm shoulder
You were steadfast in your support
You stood tall and stalwart
You were their North Star
You fathomed their needs with patience
Offered absolution generously
Provided guidance interminably
Gave love unconditionally.
You selected the perimeter of the ocean
To nature and to nurture your family
And when the relentless ocean’s hand grasped
You neither relented nor retreated
But built on high piles and high hopes
It was a pleasant stalemate of mutual conciliation
You needed to breathe deeply the sea
Explore the morning mist
Walk the ocean dunes
And with an inquiring grandchild in hand
Identify the mussels and starfish and periwinkles
You loved the oceans roar
And loved its mesmerizing silence
And the ocean was steadfast and enchanting.
Your boat skims the frigid Cape waters
To pluck and cull
The cold and spiny red lobsters
Suckled from the sea as the boat bounces
From trap to trap
And soon these land bound trophies
Immersed into the steaming pot
Precisely cooked and buttered
You chose to live by the sea
And the sea reciprocated to enchant you
It was a collaboration of love.
When life and health were in peril
You spoke your courage in your silence
And your enduring patience
Your courage grew as the challenges persisted
You were dauntless and valiant
But passive with your complaints
With your body trembling and distressed
You had the audacity to enjoy life
To its fullest.
Your courage was bountiful
You confronted the finality of life
With the same resilience that you succored life
With the same tenacity of character
Your walk was unsteady
But your character was sturdy
Your talk was uncertain
But you spoke with certitude
The pain may have been unbearable
But you embraced in silence what you had to bear
Because of your example
The world is a better place.
Your Irish-ness lived on your face
In your flippant sense of humor
In the rugged and strong bridge of your brow
The subliminal linguistic music of your voice
Your warm and flinty Celtic eyes
The resilient smile
With the devilment and wistfulness
Of a mischievous leprechaun.
The tap tap tap of the basketball
The roar and the chants
And the pandemonium of sounds
Echoing from the hardwood floors
You cheered and encouraged
Your beloved and resilient Eagles
With exuberance and passion
You and friends were constant and punctual
With your zealotry
And pleasant and limitless fanaticism
Desperately sincere and supportive
From the stands
Your eye travels
To those who warm the benches
Less than talented but eager
Not called upon but ready
Your heroes are always
The underdog and the underused and the under achiever
They were your heroes
In basketball and other endeavors
It was your belief system.
The Southwest School embraces and harbors
A park under New York skies
That shares your name
Where children with skinned knees
And wondrous expectations and ambitions
Play and dream
One can imagine a cool Autumn afternoon recess
And a child asks
“Why did they name this park after this man?”
Possibly another child will speculate
“He must have done something good.”
Dare say-- you did something good
Possibly the parents of these children
Decades before received your counsel
With a stern and compassionate eye
That never failed to twinkle.
You migrated in tandem
With the wood storks and terns and gulls
On your summer sojourns from south to north
Searching for a new and resplendent sun
You followed the long finger of the Cape
To find the ocean waiting
Offering manifold montages of morning fogs
Painted with Monet-like images
The water predictably cold and certain
You walked winter ravished beaches
Hand in hand
With the lady that is the love of your life
You and she are
Matching pieces of a lovely two-piece puzzle
The geography of your lives
Encompassed many souls and many hearts.
Together ---always together
Tending the lawn
Tending the family
Tending your friendships
Loving your Jesus
You are a splendid oneness
In some imperfect equation
You shared more with each other
Than you received.
Your commendations must be balanced
By accepting you were less than perfect
We shall not beatify you
We shall not pontificate your every word
We know you are fallible
Like all of us you have blundered and erred
Knowing your Jesus accepted us all as sinners
There shall be no monuments
No written commendations
However your penance for your imperfections
Has been paid in kind
By your endless acts of kindness
Your generous spirit
Your passion for life
You were a good man
Nonetheless only one man
Both humble and simple
And because of this imperfect man
The world is a better place.
You offered two knees to God
And preached the Gospel of Jesus
Through the decency of your life
The depth and content of your being
Rosaries and blessings and prayers
That failed to remit your afflictions
Did not weaken your faith or
Participation in the joy of life
Your parables were spoken
In your common speech to the neediest
And most downtrodden
You have not disappointed God
Because you preached his words
In your good deeds.
Every pebble that dives into a pond
Every breeze that stirs a flower
Every cloud redefining its shape
Every life that is ever lived
Leaves the world not the same
Who could have tasted your laughter
Been recipient of your friendship
Felt the touch of your sharp wit and humor
Warmed by the glow of your character
And not carry the joyful legacy of your memory
You were irresponsibly generous
With your acts of kindness
And for all of this and more
The world is a better place.
A flower flutters in the Floridian breeze
Unattended by your careful hand
The day lilies and viburnum and asters
Succor the sun without your gaze
But they shall not go fallow
All are sentinels marking the places
You walked and watered and stroked
With your caring eye and careful hand
The echo of your footsteps will diminish infinitesimally
For your absence
For your silence.
The golf course flags that once flapped
And applauded your wayward journey
Down the fairway
Stand silent for a moment each day
Lamenting your failure to return
To thrash the ball vigorously
If not with precision
And pursue a determined bogey putt
The ageless Cape breezes will seek in vain
To stroke your shoulder gently
As you wander across the beach
Friends are wistful and wishful
For your laughter and curiosity and friendship
Your family will cherish your life
And your memory.
You are a good and gentle man
God will love you well and hold you close
And record in the litany of your journey
That because of your life
The World Is a Better Place.
Journey from the Prairies
(Remembrance of Verne Hoffman (1910-2009)
Nebraska was landscaped with broad carpets of prairies
Lapping at the shores of the sweeping horizons
And the first breath of springtime was at the doorstep
After another cold and hard winter
With winds scratching and grinding the grasslands
From distant mountains
Spring-melted snows catapulted
Down dry rivers beds to feed the parched grasslands
As torrid winds meandered across the parched plains
Giving birth to spring and early blooming forsythia
On a summer day among the golden corn not ready for harvest
Under a bold blue canopy of sky
You began your journey
Born among butterflies
And prairie wild flowers and day lilies
Meadowlarks and goldenrods.
And the broad and distant horizons
From the long flat lands of Nebraska
Shaped your intelligent patient eyes
Sculpted the vessel of your soul
Architected your singular warm smile
Provided your gritty common sense
Fabricated your joy of life
Begot your capacity to love and be loved.
Under Nebraska’s broad skies
You learned of ambition and curiosity and enterprise
Not knowing how far you must travel
Nor that your voyage would be long
And the journal of your life would fill many pages
And take you to uncharted places
Your road was long by meter and duration
And many who joined you
Walked hand in your hand and side by your side
And recorded their final footsteps in now distant sands
While your traveled through another decade
And then another decade
And more decades
You carried those left behind in your memory and heart
Until you shared their hand and their side again.
You did not need old age to acquire virtue and wisdom
And humility and kindness and ardor
And joyfulness of spirit
But carried all of that and more in the cusp of your soul
Your prairie charm and simplicity and fervor
Lived in the touch of your hands
Shone from the tips of your wistful eyes
Articulated in the plaintive calmness of your speech
And your appreciation of every act of kindness however small.
You did not accept old age with trepidation
Or desperation
But with a certain patience and relentless placid wisdom
You made peace with the encumbrances of old age
And with grace
You accepted your wrinkles
As gently sculpted badges of honor
Knowing every line was well earned
Your soul was smooth and glazed
And unfettered by the rough edges
Of regret and recrimination
Complaints and admonitions were in short supply
In your vocabulary.
You both loved and were loved well and unconditionally
God knows you were less than perfect
As well as God knows
You left the world a better place
And other travelers who shared your journey
Became steady and brighter stars
Because you shone among them.
The portal of your life was bounded
On the cusp of the first decade of two great centuries
You began and ended your venture bounded by
The centennial goal posts including
A feisty first Roosevelt and the promise of Obama
The innovation of radio and the ubiquitous Internet
An earthbound world defying gravity with space shuttles
Too many wars of senseless inhumanity
And endless efforts of mankind to be more humane
To brothers and sisters and natures generous bounty
And you were part of the humanity trying to be humane.
You entered this world a novice at living
And departed well-loved and well lived
With your prairie and farming instincts
You planted your fields
Of good deeds and relationships and family
Harvesting a husband who
Shared work and life and love and laughter and tears
And you harvested a daughter
Collaborating to share an immense love and friendship
And the fields that you have harvested
Shall never go fallow.
God has waited patiently for you
His expectant hand will guide you
Accepting your life’s basket in hand
Filled with the dreams and hopes and deeds and loves
You have gathered during your journey
Just slightly shy of a full century
We thank you for your life well lived
We are changed by your presence in our lives
We shall do acts of kindness in your memory
We celebrate your life.
Now you have returned to the prairies
To the great and vast grasslands
To the fields of golden corn fingering the sky
And in the next summer of your return
To the homestead of your family and birth
You shall reach the full increment of five score years
And the centennial of your first breath
Will be celebrated by the returning
Butterflies and prairie wild flowers and meadowlarks
And goldenrods to greet you once again
And they shall all remember you well.
Embrace your God
He shall love you well
And hand in hand
Sleep warm and go quiet in your long night
Sweet and Gentle Lady.
The Legend of Hoot Owl Road
(For Joe DeCosmo who lives on Hoot Owl Road)
Prologue
I have lived in just one house all my life
On a farm on the top of a hill by a tree
And I am damned proud to say
I live on Hoot Owl Road
Surrounded by sky and hills and valleys
And hootin’ owls.
This story is a legend
Which provides a little leeway
About how much truth to tell
And how much truth to leave out
And what compromises can be made with the truth
Every generations tells the legend
And every new generation listens
And repeats the legend better than they heard it.
Legend
There was a story that was told to me
When I was just a little bigger than a toad
By my Daddy and his Daddy too
About the legend of Hoot Owl Road
And as my Daddy and Granddaddy passed
I was faithful to their legend’s code
Never knowing I would become part of
The legend of Hoot Owl Road
On a quiet night when owls are hootin’
My children ask and never fail
Hey Daddy tell us the hoot owl story
So I tell the Hoot Owl Road tale
I have lived in one house all my life
On top of a lanky hill above a farm
My family believes in lovin’ God and doing good
You never do the earth or man any harm
We are farm folk and we work hard
And God knows we love the land
And here on Hoot Owl Road
For generations we have lived and made our stand
And we are more than damned proud to say
Being a farmer is a heavy load
Surrounded by sky and hills and heaven
We lived and loved Hoot Owl Road
When someone would ask where we live
In this lovely rural farming town
We would say up yonder on Hoot Owl Road
Your welcomed to stop if you’re gonna be around
We were raised to respect traditions
With traditions and to weather any storm
Like the name my Daddy gave me
And the name of the road where I was born
Some have said that’s a funny name
For any road or street or country lane
Couldn’t you call it something else
And the road would still be the same.
Hoot Owl Road was once a forest
The hills seemed like they touched the sky
My Granddaddy stood on that hill and said
This is the place I will live and die
With ax and saw they chopped trees down
From the hills as far as you can see
To make a farm to grow their crops
And make a home for the family
When they finally got to the last tree
An old hoot owl lived there at the top
That old owl was hootin’ away
Like saying “this tree is all I got”
My Granddaddy said let’s save that tree
And leave some fields of flowers and clover
And I guess if that owl wants to stay
Let’s move the house a little ways over
The house was built of forest timber
And when they finished the last load
They built a road up to the house
God knows they named it Hoot Owl Road
For generations we tilled the fields
A thousand thousand furrows we have hoed
From working generation to generation
We farmed and lived on Hoot Owl Road
The sun would rise above the mountain
And painting those water-colored skies
It was like God saying good morning
When across the valley the sun would rise
Now that was three generations ago
And that tree is still growing tall
Generations of owls have come and gone
You can still hear their hootin’ call
After a hard day of work and farming
As we have done these many years
We would fall asleep after a long day
Hearing the hootin’ while saying our prayers
A hoot owl lives ten years or so
Doing their hootin’ in that tree above
In their home right above our home
Sharing the hills and land we all still love
When I was a boy riding in the school bus
And when it was my turn to unload
The kids on the bus would see the sign
Of the street called Hoot Owl Road
So out of fun and also some kindness
I got a name that I really suit
Hardly nobody knows my name is John
To this day they all call me “Hoot”
And sometimes in the quiet of the night
When searching for a dream that’s deep
That old hoot owl does his hootin’
And puts the night and us to sleep
Hoot owls take care of their young
And they make the world a little better
Our family tries to do exactly the same
And the owls and our family live here together
We came and lived and laughed and loved
It has been wisely said “we reap what we have sowed”
God know our family has reaped so much
On the hill on Hoot Owl Road.
Epilogue
Yes this is the story I said I would tell you
About when I was just a little bigger than a toad
From my daddy and his daddy
About the legend of Hoot Owl Road
And as my Daddy and Granddaddy passed
I was faithful to their legend and code
Never knowing I would become a part of
The story of Hoot Owl Road
On quiet nights when the owls are hootin’
My children ask me and never fail
Hey Daddy tell us the story
So I tell the Hoot Owl Road tale
I can’t tell the end of the story
Because the story still goes on and on
Until the last bit of living and farming and hootin’
On Hoot Owl Road is done and gone.