Sandusky is changing,
putting on a new face.
Parks have replaced fisheries,
suburbs,
the corn and wheat.
The giant elms have long since vanished,
and the malls
have become mini circuses.
Even the Soldier’s Home,
a campus of gray limestone
with its hundred buckeye trees,
is a denuded memorial.
Replica of the Civil War,
housing old men
who stay indoors for shade,
speak in whispers,
as if prisoners
of their own government.
The town has lived two centuries
and never matured.
No cathedral or stately avenue of homes.
Inlets dotted with battlements,
statues gathering moss
or bleached by wind.
A town that never held a ball,
danced through the years,
gave its youth balloons and confections.
But the wind
curls over waves bearded with foam,
the bay howls and sighs,
with a purity of place,
stones set together,
moldering iron,
light rising from its face,
singing the song of summer.