The BeltLine Westside Trail

Lyrics

Saturday morning.
Seventy-eight degrees before the sun gets serious.

The asphalt is new. Still black.
You can smell it over the cut grass and the diesel from Howell Mill.
We start by the steel bridge, where the warehouses got a second life.
Your skin is still clean up here.
A ribbon of progress laid right on the CSX ghost spine.
Ryan Gravel's thesis, made pavement in 2017.
They call you a trail.

Five and a half miles of a healing stitch.
Or is it a clean scar?
From the bourbon cocktails to the back porches.
North to South.
This Westside artery, carrying new blood past the old.

Past the murals, the paint is still bright, still loud.
We cross the street where the signs point to Vine City.
To English Avenue.
And now we see the other side.
The laundry on the line.
The dogs barking behind chain link fences that were here long before you.
The houses that watched the freight trains run for a hundred years, and now watch us.
The joggers in their bright shoes, a different kind of freight.

I'm walking on a buried story.
They say the old Spring Street sewer line runs right under my feet.
It backed up in 2019.
Reminded everyone what's just underneath the pretty surface.
All that history, all that pressure.
Did you think about them, Paul Morris, when you cut the ribbon?
The families the railroad pushed out in the first place?

Five and a half miles of a healing stitch.
Or is it just a clean scar?
From the warehouse lofts to the front porches.
North to South.
This Westside artery, carrying new blood past the old.

Now the light is gold.
We're getting close to the southern bend.
I can smell barbecue smoke from a backyard in West End.
You delivered us here.
A straight line through a complicated heart.
A straight line.