A Long Hard Road Part III

 RANDOM JACK POETRY HOUR: TRUE HISTORY

 

A Long Hard Road Part III

 

A dust storm came and it never left

It stretched out half a continent

High as any man could see

(of course you couldn’t see a thing)

 

Those were the Dust Bowl days

Hard times multiplied a hundred times over

Ain’t nothing you could do about it

Some say it was the farming ways

Swept out the natural brush, dried out the

land and made it ripe for the taking

Some say it was the revenge of the Cherokee

Payback is a punch in the gut

(but the Cherokee are not vengeful people)

A dust storm the size of Texas picked

up the land and blowed it all away

 

A man named Guthrie grew up in those

times and put it down in a song:

 

So long, been good to know ya

So long, it’s been good to know ya

So long, it’s been good to know ya

This dusty old dust is a gettin my home

And I’ve gotta be drifting along

 

He joined the army of the great migration

Thousands of poor folks with all their belongings

stacked up like hotcakes on an iron skillet

heading down the highway of the lost and

misguided looking for the land of plenty

 

When you think about it (and I do) it

sounds a lot like the Trail of Tears

Only there weren’t no people lined up to

watch the long loathsome trail of hardship

It came a way too close to home

 

Busted down and nearly broke

They came west to California

Where they hoped things would be better

For some maybe it was

For many it just weren’t

And that’s another story