Notes About The Poem
A tribute to the Lancaster Pike as the first paved highway in America opened in 1795 (also known as Lancaster Avenue, Lancaster Turnpike, U.S. Route 30). It runs from Philadelphia to Lancaster along the rail lines parallel with Philadelphia's famed "Main Line" for nearly sixty miles and connects to the Lincoln Highway.
The Lancaster Pike
Down this once famous graveled road
I drive by day and drive by night
my mind replaying stories of times past.
As if thinking about them
can make them real again.
Buildings standing with new faces, signs.
I see them now only as they once were
in my childlike memory, mind.
Each corner sparks a lost thought.
Transparent faces of townies crossing cross streets
a blur of long gone friends and schemes
living only in my most selfish dreams.
The Devon Horse Show grounds
where the Main Line's best show off
at its annual celebrated competition.
Villanova University where I honed my hoopster skills
a high-schooler sneaking into the gym on snowy days.
The Bouquet Flower Shop where I summer jobbed.
The Bryn Mawr Deli where I waitered posing for
giggling girls of crosstown Harcum College.
"Good Counsel" church, my reverent gothic fortress
for those important beliefs that later would fall away.
The Bryn Mawr Trust Bank that juts out proudly
on the main corner, a gray stoned prominence
where accounting of my money's worth was kept.
It too a dream. A dream of a future now lived.
Sepia shadows of decades ago.
A feeling of loss wells up within me
of time I want back again.
To right lost wrongs. To try again somehow.
Sometimes I turn away so not to remember.
But I have no way of getting there.
Street after street, ghost after ghost
looking down alleys and ways
in my haunting trance.
So many visions with no redeeming consequences.
Simple reminiscences of my time, my simple life
and this once famous graveled road.
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