Oklahoma

When it came on the radio
tonight I began to weep,
not for the musical,
or the flat, red-dirt state
I was driven through
by those bastards who knew
they weren’t going to hire me
even before they flew me there,
and who, when I asked them
what happened to the trees, said,
tornadoes ripped them all out,
but for the grandfather
I never knew,
the Welsh preacher,
north Georgia circuit-rider, who,
instead of shunning his only son’s
fifteen-year-old bride,
met them at the station,
how he drove them, singing ,
“Oh, what a beautiful morning”
the whole way home.
Santa