Take the well-worn path past Muscadine vines.
Walk along a leveed bank where the bayou flows.
See the cypress tree, standing all alone,
in the middle of a tow bar, on a rise it grows.
Stand beneath the shade where the blackbirds roost.
Climb the ancient live oak trees planted in a ring.
Hear the bullfrogs croak and the marsh bird’s call.
Let your heart take in the song the muddy water sings.
Rosy spoonbills wade, alligators swim
where the blue and yellow irises so thickly thrive.
Watch a raft of ducks drifting slowly by:
makes a country boy feel happy just to be alive.
When the hot noon sun blazes overhead
time to try another tumbler of some ice-cold tea.
Take a rocking chair, with a piece of pie,
let that southern way of living be your recipe.
Grandma’s house was old, but was well preserved.
It was passed down through her family generations back.
All the souls that grew up and died there knew
they were poorer, yet in nothing did they ever lack.
Chickens, pigs and beef they most proudly raised;
kept a garden, grew tomatoes, tilled the marshy land.
Prowled the broad bayous for their fish and game,
made their living from most anything they found at hand.
Grandad sent his sons to a school up North.
Hoped they’d find a better future than his family had.
On the paths they chose, up the ranks they rose,
but they hardly came to visit and that made him sad.
Modern lives they lived were a world away.
Nothing back there in the bayou could have brought them home.
They had bright careers, stopped by once a year,
let the old folks work the farm land they would someday own.
All the neighbors came when their Grandad died.
They brought dishes they prepared, and on that day it rained.
When the boys arrived and the wake was held
neighbors came by to console them and to shared their pain.
Now the farm is gone, Grandma long since passed.
Briars took over the pastures and the fence is down.
Someone bought the land where the homestead stood;
hailed from Birmingham, or Houston or some larger town.
The brown bayou flows, and the marsh birds wade.
The wild irises still bloom along its banks each spring.
Can you see them sway in the balmy breeze,
Can you hear the muddy waters of the bayou sing?