Remnants of Yesteryear's Bounty

By: Hunter Christian

 

An orphaned piano plays solemn tunes
In a ghost town by night
By day, the piano sits in silence
Echoes echo through the grand hall

Tapestries catalog histories abandoned
Winter to spring through summer and fall
Strong statured apparitions; court others of fairer stature
Coattails long, cocktails strong, top hats tall

Frilly laced gowns
Mundane frowns
Slender necks adorning mithril chains
From the chains hanged lockets

Pellucid gents with gilded pocket watches
Watch for wryly pick-pockets
Fairer maidens courted by fair gents
Time and place abdicated;
to the supernatural

From boyhood, from maidenhood
Cosmopolitan from hardscrabble
The wildcatter made good
His chattel laborers labor under snapped whips

Whipped readily
Cracked hard upon sturdy backs
Riches came easily to easy characters
Blood spilled for meager wages

Two-bits a dance
From ladies-of-the-night
Who sold with each dance feign romance
Haunted echoes echoed into the nightscape

Robber barons of The Gilded Age
Brides hunting gilded bridegroom
The societal divergence abound
The lowly mingled alongside the upper crust

The masculine bartered its social wares with the feminine
Until the mines relinquished no more gold
The silver, copper, and salt mines too
Gone for good

Southward the profiteers migrated
Black gold shot skyward in tales of lure
Another boomtown went bust
As another boomtown boomed into life

Prosperity abound from impoverished strife
Promised wealth belied
One town’s townsfolk given to flight
As wood architecture rotted, windows clouded over, wells dried to dust
as metal turned to rust,
tumbleweed clichés came to fruition,
as ghost winds raged in haunted gusts

Nouveau-riche fund ivy league tuition
Generations hence
A mansion secured with a wrought-iron fence
“New Money” earned its rung
On America's gilded social ladder

A middle class arose
The American worker, the everyman
The former became the latter
Boomtown abandoned

Families abandoned homesteads, storefronts too, the livery gone
Save for a few dozen worn headstones
No passersby would have known
A man with a name called this town home

He sweat, he toiled, he married, bore children
His final harvest for a final seed sown
An orphaned life in death
In an orphaned town a timeless figure;
plays an orphaned piano

Solemn tunes played for solemn souls
Restless souls haunting an old tired haunt
A maiden accepts an extended pale hand
A drunkard spews foolhardy taunts

A working girl accepts two-bits
Dancing phantoms of a wayward age and time; dance the night away
A tavern's clock chimes
The hall's walls send wafting good acoustics;
into the night air

Upon the fabric of time and place;
history's blade did tear; has torn
As time's tumblers tumbled
A country was born

Cogs locked on to its station
As the Texas ground and iron horses rumbled
Henceforth the glory, the story, of a prosperous nation;
grandiose and bold,
told, forgotten, and retold;
to the youth of America,
from gray-haired generations of ole