Ghost Town
In this holy ghost
of a desert mining town,
houses hang out on hillsides
like hippies, flowered
and batiked, waiting
for salvation. They arrived
where you and I were
fifty years ago, rooted
in Grateful Dead and weed
and epiphanies. Once these hills
bloomed copper, but like you
and me, they withered,
their hard times of no
consequence to the cloudless
sky. Now poppies panic
in the heat, try to be orange
in the middle of these long
slow deaths; porches wilt
into parched earth, peeling
paint falls in petals. Now
70-year-olds with long gray hair
settle in to make things--
pottery and candles and images
of flowers—or some kind
of difference like they thought
they should. You and I pass
through, visitors here
and to each other, stopping
at the crossroads, the only
ones who marvel how
these houses, clinging
to so little, ignore the pull
of gravity clawing for their lives.
Linda Culp Holmes has a B.A. in English literature. During her 26-year career for a government contractor, she wrote proposals for government funding, web content, and educational materials. She has won awards in poetry from organizations in Tennessee and California, and has had work published in the Red Branch Review, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, The Ekphrastic Review, and Amethyst Review, among others. Her non-fiction book, If I Am So Lucky: A Portrait of a Man in Perilous Times, 1862-1865 was published by Heritage Books, Inc. in 2023. She lives in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
In this holy ghost
of a desert mining town,
houses hang out on hillsides
like hippies, flowered
and batiked, waiting
for salvation. They arrived
where you and I were
fifty years ago, rooted
in Grateful Dead and weed
and epiphanies. Once these hills
bloomed copper, but like you
and me, they withered,
their hard times of no
consequence to the cloudless
sky. Now poppies panic
in the heat, try to be orange
in the middle of these long
slow deaths; porches wilt
into parched earth, peeling
paint falls in petals. Now
70-year-olds with long gray hair
settle in to make things--
pottery and candles and images
of flowers—or some kind
of difference like they thought
they should. You and I pass
through, visitors here
and to each other, stopping
at the crossroads, the only
ones who marvel how
these houses, clinging
to so little, ignore the pull
of gravity clawing for their lives.
Linda Culp Holmes has a B.A. in English literature. During her 26-year career for a government contractor, she wrote proposals for government funding, web content, and educational materials. She has won awards in poetry from organizations in Tennessee and California, and has had work published in the Red Branch Review, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, The Ekphrastic Review, and Amethyst Review, among others. Her non-fiction book, If I Am So Lucky: A Portrait of a Man in Perilous Times, 1862-1865 was published by Heritage Books, Inc. in 2023. She lives in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
