Note: While authors are asked to place warnings on their stories for some moderated content, everyone has different thresholds, and it is your responsibility as a reader to avoid stories or stop reading if something bothers you.
Disasters, Delights and Other Detours - 27. Haibun at Concord
I traveled to Boston for a large family wedding. The morning before the ceremony, I had time to kill, and decided to escape the urban summer heat and go to Concord, home of Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. There, too, are historic sites, where British redcoats faced a ragged militia in a running skirmish which ignited the American Revolution.
I found directions to Orchard House, home of Louisa May Alcott, a writer of considerable following. My great aunt, who owned a bookstore in the Great Depression, could quote her.
My car fit
in the last parking place
where you played and harvested apples;
tourists swarm, imagining you imagining,
wondering how you wrote your stories
without internet or
coffee shop.
I drove past Walden Pond, but found the parking areas closed. Weekend visitors were already flocking to the Massachusetts state park now occupying the pond where Thoreau spent days pondering the nature of mankind and one’s relationship to the community.
I pondered,
what you would make of them,
the summer crowds flocking to your pond,
where once Nature caressed you in her green retreat;
they now blare wireless banality
and strew wood and water
with litter.
There was plenty of parking at the Old North Bridge, where British soldiers fired upon advancing Minutemen. The Emerson family could watch it all from the windows of their home not two hundred yards away. Later, it was possible to walk a portion of the Battle Road, the long road back from Concord to Boston, made all the worse for the British soldiers by the incessant flanking attacks from the irregular American militias.
Spandex clad,
middle aged, overweight
suburbanites jog and pedal past,
heedless of the battle and the lives lost here;
the Shot Heard ‘Round the World is silenced
by cell phone chatter and
bikes passing.
- 5
- 3
Note: While authors are asked to place warnings on their stories for some moderated content, everyone has different thresholds, and it is your responsibility as a reader to avoid stories or stop reading if something bothers you.
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