Smithville, U.S.A.

(As this was authored on the same night as the prior poem, titled "The Roller Coaster," I must have been reminiscing over my experiences on the Powell High School Scholars' Bowl team from the fall of 1997 until I graduated in May 2000. While playing, we traveled through East and much of Middle Tennessee to compete at tournaments against the best competition the state had to offer. My senior year on Spring Break, the team traveled to Vanderbilt University in downtown Nashville to compete with teams from all across the nation, and along the drive west on I-40, one passes an exit for the very small town called Smithville. As I understand what others have told me who have actually driven in the town, it is essentially a one-road, one-restaurant, one school for each of the major age groups community. It seems to me not just bizarrely-quixotic that such a place exists, but that I began hearkening back upon my thoughts of Grant Wood's rural American Utopian painted masterpiece you and I both know as "American Gothic." Below are both the painting as well as the poem evoking my ardors for this lost vestige of Americana.)

(Above: "American Gothic," as painted by Grant Wood, circa 1930. Housed in The Art Institute of Chicago Building, an example of Modernism.)

Smithville, U.S.A.                 Written in 2002 (Edited on September 29, 2013)

Drive down to Dixie on a warm, sunny day, 
See all the common folk walk, and how they meander astray!
This isn't big enough for you or me to sin, 
And heck, it's barely big enough for the Smithville Inn.

Shall we pull up to the city's drive-thru and park?

I'm loathe to bear its simplicity and quiet harmonious spark!

*Refrain: This is Smithville, Smithville, U.S.A., 
Out in the middle of the amber waves, blowing away! 
A place where life's so simple, you'd wonder, "What's the deal?" 
For Smithville is so real and quixotic because it's surreal! 

At first glance, one might consider this God's Country, 
For all the thrushes of farmland flourish, 'tis an agricultural sea! 
The Smithville library, the Smithville school, the Smithville restaurant, 
So, who could see the beauty here other than a true savant? 

* Refrain: For this is Smithville, Smithville, U.S.A. ....

The ghosts of antebellum times past doth loom, 
Some might look at Nashville for all her gluttonous gloom. 
Why drive on a 7th Avenue when you get by on just one? 
General Jackson's ghost survives in how Smithville was done! 

* Refrain: For this is Smithville, Smithville, U.S.A. .... 

*Refer to the second stanza for the rest of the lyrics.