Cherokee Road NW: The Ancient Trace

Lyrics

Cherokee Road.
They gave you a name.
But it wasn't your first name.
You were not always asphalt.
You were not always an address.

Before the numbered houses, before the curbs,
you were just a suggestion in the leaf litter.
A trace of packed earth, winding.
Following the high ground to avoid the swamp.
Moccasins knew your curves,
carrying news from Standing Peachtree,
down to the Chattahoochee.
Under the old oaks, through the scent of pine.
You were a line of life, drawn by footfalls.

And they call you Cherokee Road.
A name like a monument on a grave.
A memory paved over, but the shape remains.
The ghost of the path is the line you still trace.
What was your real name?
The wind doesn't remember.
The asphalt doesn't care.

Then came the maps. The straight lines.
The treaties written in ink that bled like a wound.
The early autumn chill of the 1830s.
A silence fell where the footfalls had been.
The path grew over.
Waited.
Listened to the saws and the hammers,
the new language that didn't know how to ask
for your story.

And they call you Cherokee Road.
A name like a monument on a grave.
A memory paved over, but the shape remains.
The ghost of the path is the line you still trace.
What was your real name?
The wind doesn't remember.
The asphalt doesn't care.

That gentle curve by number 21?
It isn’t for the convenience of a motorcar.
It’s for a stream that dried up a century ago.
That dip in the road?
It follows the roots of a great oak they felled.
You still obey the old contours.
The land's logic, buried deep.
A secret you keep from the wheels that roll over you.

Cherokee Road.
A name for what's gone.
A whisper of the trace.
Your first name is lost.
It is written in the earth.
Under the asphalt.