URBAN RENEWAL

URBAN RENEWAL

I used to dream the Bay Area was surrounded by snowcapped peaks, 

and I wondered which mountain range I was channeling. 

San Francisco was home, my natal ground,

but wanderlust took me to the Sierra Nevada range,

then north to Seattle, Vancouver, and Horseshoe Bay, 

and then up-island to isolated fishing hamlets, Naniamo, 

Uclulet on the mailboat, we drove to Tofino on dirt roads 

before there was a gringo trail. 

I remember walking along the bluffs below Pike Street Market 

where the native people slept it off from the night before, 

they were littered along the railroad tracks like strange pinnipeds.

The forgotten ones filled the jails, and a nation turned its back 

on the indigent and those of fragile mind and body, 

pushed for urban renewal to clean up the riffraff for once and for all.

The detritus of the past, swept away like a tidal wave before our eyes.

In Vancouver BC, first Gastown, and then Chinatown disappeared.

The streets of Ferndale and Eureka, steam-cleaned. 

There was nowhere else left for the indigent to go. 

Folks rejoiced waiting for fresh-eyed tourists to arrive.

The Marin architect that cleaned up Ghirardelli Square, 

blueprinted the way with cookie-cutter plans for urban renewal.

The underbellies of cities, gutted like fish, stripped of psyche.

It was like an echo, the cavernous gods of tourism, each town

lost more than an inconvenient eyesore. Now, across America,

malls, dressed in brick façades and quaint lamp posts, lie fallow, 

a wasteland of tourist dollars with shops selling teeshirts 

as if to prove residency, and bright trinkets made in China. 

Meanwhile, the indigent moved uptown to sleep on street corners.

Those mountains in my dreams, they were in mourning, 

protecting those who grew up in their shadow.

2/16/22 CPITS Write On! Terri Glass class First final draft.