[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]

I turned off Freeport road,
into a shallow valley of worn farmland,
empty warehouse and factory piles
of rusted shorn rail heaps,
and copper yard refuge,
trestle bridge fallen to despairing blight.

Gone are those halcyon days,
gone forever into a bended road,
down to a gorge of greed,
global growth, the sellout, left us waysided,
forgotten, forlorn are these small scripts
of towns on a tattered map.

Lincoln spoke here, Douglas too,
far back, into our mystical nation’s past,
extinguished from myth
and books now forbidden,
a glory-full history smeared clean,
into a future abyss, to be written anew.

But alas, the story stays the same,
for death and destruction
surely will follow these revolutions
of dangerous, deluded and deadly dreams.