Battle of Atlanta: The Land Remembers

Lyrics

I was here before the maps were drawn. Before the city had a name. I remember the sun on July twenty-second, eighteen sixty-four. It was a heavy, indifferent heat. The kind that bakes the clay and silences the birds. They came along the Decatur Road. Two colors of dust, blue and grey, settling on my pines. They carved their shallow lines into my skin. Earthworks, they called them. Scars, I called them. My oaks, centuries old, fell to make their walls. Hood's men moved through the undergrowth, a secret I was forced to keep. The air grew thick with waiting. The land does not take sides. The red Georgia clay accepts all blood the same. I only feel the trembling. I only hear the roar. I hold the iron and the lead and the bone, and I remember. I remember it all. Then the heat broke. Not with rain, but with fire. A vibration started deep in my bedrock. Bald Hill became a screaming thing, a crown of smoke and iron. My pines splintered, weeping sap and shrapnel. I felt the fall of McPherson, a single heavy thud in the woods. Just one among thousands. The creeks ran warm and dark, carrying away what they could. The land does not take sides. The red Georgia clay accepts all blood the same. I only feel the trembling. I only hear the roar. I hold the iron and the lead and the bone, and I remember. I remember it all. And then, the quiet. A quiet louder than the cannons. The sun went down on fields turned to an ocean of mud. The smell of black powder and fear settled like a foul dew. They left. They always leave. Leaving me with the silence, and the settling. You walk here now. You build your houses on the cooled-off ground. You cannot see the scars. But I feel the weight. The roots of the new grass grow around the memory. The land remembers.