A Perspective

A rusted shovel head
molded into the gravel ground,
resting just under a stand of elegant old oaks
catches my eye as I pad the trail
through eighty-odd years old
iron ore territory, vast open trenches,
dynamite gashes cut into the crust,
and buried beside it a brown iron spike,
a railroad tie half rotted lying by.
I imagine the same trees in adolescence,
and a bustle of dusty thick-accented men,
passing through unhewn scaffolding
like ants to their tunnels, a steady clank
and buzz of Depression-Era mechanics,
violent blasts and burn-piles of refuse
blazing smoke into the bleeding sky.
I look back, justified,
feeling the incongruity of their business,
the ecological rent and rending,
and despise their callousness.
Under the thin shade
of the oaks and the artifacts
I saw, and was again caught,
by a cigarette butt in the gravel,
just then I felt my own barbs
dig in--seeing it there
resting so recently--
my own indignation
at the roughness of my grandparent's generation
turned back on mine
from the generations that lay ahead,
the naivete of my own time.