This poem was published in Lyrical Iowa, 2015, by the Iowa Poetry Association

Janet M. Gibson

Lamentations for Pennypack Park The twenty-foot wide path to the waterfalls was well worn before that fateful day the creek overflowed and flooded, rapidly ravaging this aesthetic path beyond recovery. The hard-packed soil, which buried footsteps of humans and horses, quarry rocks, and gangly roots of tall, weathered trees, loosened, like seaweed in hurricane-whipped surf. A mountain of water, an avalanche of rocks left behind an angry, chaotic topography, an unwalkable path with enormous ruts, like ransacked, opened graves. The park's playful Brownie sprites and elves, the friendly ghosts of my nostalgic past are gone, the vacuum replaced by unwieldy weeds, grasses and plants, like scabs sickly covering an open wound. From the footbridge downstream where I used to anticipate our journey to the falls, the scene chokes all hints of a path. Now I travel a trail of tears.

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