Springvale's Embrace: Contoured for Community

Lyrics

The grass is still cool.
Still holding the night.
I walk the line where the dew hasn't dried.
A quiet breath before the day arrives.

You were not an accident.
Not a grid of straight lines.
I hear Joel Hurt's quiet word, a whisper in the pines:
"Give me a garden, not a geometry."
And so the Olmsted hands arrived,
To read the land, to feel its rise and fall.
They sculpted you from red Georgia clay,
A dream contoured for us all.

Oh, Springvale, your green embrace.
This gentle lung, this quiet, beating heart.
You gather us in this contoured space,
And hold us here, together and apart.

I trace the paths that never hurry.
Winding, like a thought let loose to roam.
Past the iron bench where stories worry themselves out.
Down to the ravine, the secret hollow,
That drinks the summer rain and asks for more.
You were designed for function and for follow-
ing the natural law.

Oh, Springvale, your green embrace.
This gentle lung, this quiet, beating heart.
You gather us in this contoured space,
And hold us here, together and apart.

I smell the turned earth of eighteen-ninety.
The scent of saplings, reaching for the sun.
Then the sound arrives, from nineteen seventy-two...
The festival music, a new life begun.
And now, just the murmur of a Sunday morning,
A dog's soft panting, a distant, happy shout.
You hold all the years without a warning,
You let them in, you never shut them out.

Yes, you hold the quiet hours.
The laughter and the leaves.
Springvale.
You breathe.