The Hood

Now you see it, now you don't.
From day one, the neighborhood began to change.
The Cherokees were evicted, slavery admitted,
mint juleps, cotton mills and whips.
One nation under Mars.
The War Between The States.

If you had your finger on the pulse
when Hitler waltzed the goose
(meaning goose stepping, the SS keeping cadence)
you would've have sensed that as the town snoozed,
change it would. Came Pearl Harbor,
so we did what did. We nuked their sake and hero their shima.

That war was right, and we Johnnies marched home victorious,
and the hood really began to change, housing galore and malls.
There at the gate of the family farm, a returning marine.
There on Times Square, a returning sailor
bends his doll into a "c," plants her kiss that makes the front page.
And me - the Marine, I was lost in action in Iwo Jima.

Sixty years have passed, follow the path to the church yard,
head down Main Street, turn left at the drugstore,
visit the park across from the Courthouse,
see the memorial I hewed for myself.
"To the warriors of the Thousand Year Wars,
and to the future Armageddon."

Yep, the neighborhood!
Now you see it, now you don't.