Five Points: The Geographic Heart

Lyrics

[Intro]
You are the center. 
The place every map starts.
I put my hand on your asphalt skin in July.
Ninety-eight degrees in the shade you don't have.

[Verse 1]
Before the name, before the name before that one.
Stephen H. Long, 1837, kneeling in the red mud.
No one wrote down the sound the survey stake made.
Just the plat map after.
Just the single payroll line for the unnamed men who graded the earth for the Western & Atlantic.
The end of the line. Terminus.

[Chorus]
This is the place.
The zero-mile post under a stranger's shoe.
Peachtree, Marietta, Edgewood, Decatur, Whitehall.
Five arteries to one heart.
Atlanta. The city's first breath was taken here.

[Verse 2]
They called you Marthasville for a while.
For Martha Atalanta Lumpkin, a name too soft for a railroad town.
By 1847, you found the right fit.
I saw the Sanborn map from 1895.
The old street grades, the first skin you shed.
Already learning to build on top of yourself.
Already burying your own history to make room.

[Chorus]
This is the place.
The zero-mile post under a stranger's shoe.
Peachtree, Marietta, Edgewood, Decatur, Whitehall.
Five arteries to one heart.
Atlanta. The city's first breath was taken here.

[Bridge]
I remember a specific Tuesday, 12:17 in the afternoon.
July 14, 1983.
The air tasted of hot tar, bus diesel, and roasted peanuts from a cart on the corner.
And in 1922, someone lost a peach-pit whistle here.
Dropped it from a trolley car.
Offered a five-dollar reward in the Atlanta Constitution.
A small, specific heartbreak.
That's the kind of detail you keep.

[Outro]
The Gold Line train pulls out forty feet below me.
The number 3 bus sighs at the Decatur Street curb.
Everything arrives here.
Everything departs from here.
The iron stake is gone.
But the point remains.
Zero.