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In Glen Ellyn, Illinois
my footsteps work the ground
forty long years after I exported myself.

Those footsteps still pay a local tax
to appear in the dirt near the swing set
on the hill overlooking the lake.

Once a place has been a part of you,
it never lets you go completely.
Or you see it in sepia toned, dog-eared memories.

My survival appears so ordinary.
In the ground a hundred childhood atrocities
lay buried waiting for archaeologists.

I mean, they are excavated and brushed clean
in some therapeutic lab, awaiting display at a museum
for the curious and those who tag along.

In Albuquerque, New Mexico
my present footsteps thru the Sandia Mountains
appeal to my nineteen-sixties footsteps

to stop their seismic activity
that threatens to alter the Mississippi’s flow
and tilt Lake Michigan to drain south.

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copyright © 2019 Kenneth P. Gurney