Capital City Club: A Name Bestowed

Lyrics

Brookhaven.
I say your name.
Just to feel the shape of it.

It was nineteen-ten.
The air smelled of cut pine and fresh paint.
A wound in the red clay, smoothed over.
Made perfect.
For men with summer suits and quiet money.
They built a clubhouse first.
Drew a line around their leisure.
And gave it a name.
Your name.

You weren't born of the wild peach trees, or the creek's quiet turn.
You were born on an invitation, printed in careful cursive.
A name for a fairway, a name for a Sunday brunch.
And the mapmakers came, and they wrote you down.
They wrote you down.

The name escaped the iron gates.
It drifted over the new-laid roads.
It settled on the mailboxes of houses that couldn't see the greens.
A borrowed coat.
A second-hand identity.
The most prominent thing on a mostly empty page.
So they called the whole page after you.

You weren't born of the wild peach trees, or the creek's quiet turn.
You were born on an invitation, printed in careful cursive.
A name for a fairway, a name for a Sunday brunch.
And the mapmakers came, and they wrote you down.
They wrote you down.

And the men who swung the axes?
Who poured the foundations?
They had names, too.
But not for the land.
A hundred years of people, living under a name
they never chose.
A name meant to keep the world out,
that ended up naming the world.

Capital City Club now.
The City of Brookhaven now.
The ink is dry.
But I remember.
It was just a name for a clubhouse.
Once.