Empty Streets - a poem of dying small town America

Shadows and tumbleweeds rule it
that row of store fronts in the small town
so far from the tourists' byways it died.

Children left the farms for jobs in glass walled monsters far away
and when they came back had tastes, the variety and general store would not sate.

The wind sways the grasses
that grow between the bricks and cracks
of road and sidewalk abandoned.

There was a time when it was busy
when folks came home and shopped in town
then the Big Boxes came to the Rural.....

And seduced their children and others to its bright wide walls, leaving the stores
cafes and repair shops to slowly die, with only the bar on the corner still thriving.

The street is empty, save one day a year
when folks pretend to still have some pride
and mock the ghosts in the old shops.

Who stare out unseen and mourn the death of the town they had been part of
and understand at last the tales of the empty places in mining country.