Marietta Square: Echoes of a Smaller Town

Lyrics

[Intro]


[Verse 1]
John Glover’s promise.
A square of green, just here, for the public good.
I can almost smell the pine sap from the 1830s.
The sound of saws and hammers, laying out the grid.
A town breathing itself into existence around this quiet, central lung.

[Chorus]
And the train still runs past the edge of the park.

The rumble shakes the bricks of the Kennesaw House.
Saturday laughter and the smell of roasted corn...
laid right over the smell of gunpowder from July of '64.

[Verse 2]
Sherman's men camped right here.
Their blue coats against the green grass.
They say the smoke could be seen for miles when the burning started.
And almost everything turned to ash.
Except the Kennesaw House.
Staring out, then and now.
A hotel, a hospital, a headquarters.
A survivor made of brick and stubborn silence.

[Chorus]
And the train still runs past the edge of the park.

The rumble shakes the bricks of the Kennesaw House.
Saturday laughter and the smell of roasted corn...
laid right over the smell of gunpowder from July of '64.

[Bridge]

A century turns.
Nineteen-oh-eight.
The Ladies' Memorial Association.
The sharp sound of a chisel on granite for the Confederate dead.
The monument stands in the sun, tall and certain.
And I listen for the ghosts who don't have a stone.
The Muscogee voices on the wind before the deeds were signed.
The unspoken names from the Jim Crow years.

[Outro]

A blues band is playing in the gazebo now.
The Strand Theatre marquee is lit.
I can feel the bass drum in my chest.
And then... the ground trembles, just a little, a feeling deep in the bone.

It's just the train passing through.
It's always the train.
Shaking the past into the present.