Battle of Atlanta: The Land Remembers

Lyrics

Before the names, I was here.
Before Sherman, before Hood.
I am the red clay. The patient stone.
The deep ravine that held the summer heat.
And I remember the sound before the sound.
The quiet of July twenty-first, eighteen sixty-four.
A held breath.

They came before the sun.
Their boots churned my dust into a nervous cloud.
They cut into me with shovels,
scraped raw the slope of Leggett's Hill,
left it bald for the sky to see.
They whispered battle plans into the leaves of my oaks.
I felt the weight of their fear,
the hard press of their rifles against my skin.
I drank the sweat from their brows as they waited.

I remember the thunder that was not the sky.
I remember the rain that was not water.
I drank the iron and the sorrow.
The ground remembers.
The roots run deep through the trenches you dug and forgot.
The Georgia soil holds every echo.
Every last whisper.

Then the afternoon broke.
A roar that shook the granite in my bones.
The Troup Hurt House trembled on its foundations.
I saw the general fall from his horse,
McPherson, a name the wind carried away.
My pines splintered, my oaks rained down limbs.
The air turned to acrid smoke and metal dust.
They fought for a railroad line, a line across my body.
And for hours, I was nothing but vibration and screaming.

I remember the thunder that was not the sky.
I remember the rain that was not water.
I drank the iron and the sorrow.
The ground remembers.
The roots run deep through the trenches you dug and forgot.
The Georgia soil holds every echo.
Every last whisper.

And then... the silence.
A quiet so loud it deafened the cicadas.
They twisted the rails into neckties, a strange offering.
They buried their dead inside me.
Seasons turned. Rain washed the powder away.
Grass began its slow work of forgetting for you.
My green shoots pushed through the rifle pits.

But I do not forget.
The creek water still runs with a memory of rust.
Under the foundations of your houses,
under the quiet paths of the park,
the pulse is still there. Faint.
Listen.
The land remembers.