Peachtree Creek: The Trees Remember

Lyrics

I am the clay, patient and red.
I am the water in the creek bed.
Before the uniforms, before the names,
I was the quiet ground, waiting for the rains.

It was July twentieth, eighteen sixty-four.
The air was a wet blanket, heavy and sore.
I felt the footfalls, thousands deep,
disturbing the roots where the snakes sleep.
Blue coats and grey coats, they trampled the ferns.
George Thomas's men, following the turns
of my ravines. John Hood's boys, a desperate tide.
Cyrus Boyd wrote it down, with nowhere to hide.
He called my woods 'rough country'.
He wasn't wrong.

The oaks took the lead without a sound.
The pines held the shrapnel deep in the ground.
The red clay drank what was spilled that day,
and the creek ran a different color, come what may.
I don't know the name of the human quarrel.
I only know the weight. And the story that is moral.

A sudden thunder that was not the sky
shook my oldest branches, and I learned why
trees can splinter. The air turned to sulfur and smoke,
choking the scent of pine with every cannon stroke.
Men fell against my bark, a final, heavy lean.
Their warmth soaked into me, a stain I'd never clean.
It was a brief, hot fever. A convulsion of the land.
A human storm I could not understand.

The oaks took the lead without a sound.
The pines held the shrapnel deep in the ground.
The red clay drank what was spilled that day,
and the creek ran a different color, come what may.
I don't know the name of the human quarrel.
I only know the weight. And the story that is moral.

And when the noise stopped...
the silence was worse.
A twilight of groans, a landscape under a curse.
Years passed. The grass grew over the trenches.
The farmers' plows found iron, breaking their benches.
The lumberjack's saw screamed against a bullet's grief,
a metal memory locked inside a leafing life.

Now houses stand on the ridges they fought to keep.
Their foundations are settled where the fallen sleep.
The children play. The dogs bark at the cars.
But the heartwood still remembers the scars.
I remember.