IF YOU LIVED HERE, YOU'D BE HOME

Outside:

the construction workers

powershift

their bulldozers 

into drive and 

decimate the view across the street.

From inside my classroom

I hear them

making mincemeat

of the hills

that have been there

since I was a child.

A year or so from now

the on-line journalists

will call the new

traffic progress

and will laud

the new families

taking root in the

master planned development

of a hundred or so new houses.

And each morning after

the kids

will cross the street to the school

and once again, my desks

will fill as they have every

september 

for the last two decades.

But the only thing left

of the west hills

where my cousins

used to ride their

dirt bikes and hide
at night

with their cigarettes

and their homies

will be a bit of green

and brown dirt

and a few lonely trails

that live in my mind's eye

like a eulogy of

my forgotten childhood.