Atlanta's Embrace: Holding On

Lyrics

You were a shadow in a bigger shadow.
A name on a map drawn by someone else.
DeKalb County's northern corner.
Atlanta's sprawling breath.
Just... a direction.

Before the seal, before the charter,
there was the sound of a well-hit ball from the Capital City Club.
Nineteen-ten.
A name given, not chosen.
And the stone masons at Oglethorpe,
raising gothic walls, stone by stubborn stone.
An anchor against the current.
Something to hold onto.

And oh, the pull of that city's heart.
The gravity of its name.
We were just a whisper on Peachtree Road,
a passenger in a faster lane.
But you held on.
Atlanta's embrace, yes.
But holding on to your own bones.

Peachtree is a river that flows both ways.
It carries their news, their sirens, their ambitions north.
And it carries our cars, our errands, our quiet lives south.
We paid taxes to a courthouse that felt a county away.
Answered to a government that couldn't find our streets.
We were a place, a feeling,
long before we were a city.

And oh, the pull of that city's heart.
The gravity of its name.
We were just a whisper on Peachtree Road,
a passenger in a faster lane.
But you held on.
Atlanta's embrace, yes.
But holding on to your own bones.

Then came the summer nights.
Humid, thick with talk.
Lawn signs blooming in the dark.
A question asked out loud, finally.
Are we our own?
July twenty-fourth, two thousand twelve.
A single, collective breath held in the heat.
The sound of a pencil marking a box.
The sound of a shadow deciding to have its own light.

The embrace is still there.
The shadow still falls at dawn.
But now, you stand in it.
You cast your own.
Brookhaven.
You answer to your own name.
You answer.