Eric Ashford Poet Free verse

How Ohio Came to Fame

A fragment of matted stone breaks surface,
it is already colonized
        by moss and fungi factories.
Eventually all will churn
     green spawns to green lawns,
not yet of course, ‘yet’ has to wait
for the rain and the blood to settle.

Stone must be crushed
by the weight of circumstance,
      a microscopic slime
pushed up above a miasmic mud
to become our living graveyards.

The Shawnee come and go
their last battles a war dance
passing like fireflies
                on a summers night.

Layers of settlers add calcium to forest roots.
Time seeds towns,
industry turns rough hands
                                      over mind-made wheels.

Worms grow fat.
Tornadoes of antique shops
emerge out of a storied history.
            Abandoned Mills evolve
into art galleries.
Old railway lines end
                      where they began.

The moss returns,
blight creeps as it levels.
The larger the urban sprouting,
the more the moss and lichen flourish.

Eventually though, Ohio
will leave its foliate forest temples
            to be discovered
by incipient microbes 
             that even now
live on the underside of rocks,
as codified plans and veined blueprints.
                of a future expansion.

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