I awake not to singing birds but to the rumbling and clunking iron tracks of bulldozers and rock crushers. With a combination of anger, sadness and loss, I run with moccasined feet toward the machines of “progress”.
What was once open land and home to coyotes, rabbits, birds, butterflies and ancient wild flowers.
Is in dust.
I come back to the now desolate landscape soon to be paved, lawned and streetlighted in the evening to hear the the sorrowful song of mother birds missing their home and children. Trauma to the land never to be the same. Migrating birds must pass this former respit as they have with other fallen land.
One by one the vacant fields go. Most people pass by.
But the children who live nearby, the field is their place of wildness, of not structure. Where they can find themselves.
The greatest national parks are important. But the vacant fields next door are equally so.