Ceremony

What happened to those boys who threatened the hills? Who parked old trucks in fields and blasted 90s hip hop, Jay-Z shouting I'm from the school of hard knocks. Our ancestors traded in the land. An incantation, a visioning of those boys I tore through the countryside with. We passed our parents pain meds around, washed them down with cheap beer. Uninitiated, we smelled the seasons, but had no ceremony for them. Even our rituals were weak. Even our sacraments were second-rate. We thought the forgiving landscape was everywhere and in everything and would absorb and forgive our mistakes. But it was not. We raged around corners, launched beer bottles at stop signs. Explosions echoing into the dusk, into the cool, quiet pine forests by the roadside. Sounds of whippoorwills in the forest. Spider lilies blossoming in the river each spring. The fracture and spreading torment of the land. The great, green swaths scraped raw. The mill is gone. Nothing but dirt and debris inside. The churning center shipped away. Our diaspora: withering behind computer screens instead of looms. Atlanta, Charlotte, and Nashville. Some stayed to tread water. Heads up and not a word. A river of antidepressants and beer, wife beaters, custody battles, opioids, and raging alone in the soft glow of the phone at night. On the screen, another dead father.