LJ Idol Wheel of Chaos: "This Lonely Highway"

[halfshellvenus]

This Lonely Highway
Idol Wheel of Chaos | Week 16, #1
Kako no ashoito (memories/events/influences from the past)

x-x-x-x-x

Wheeling through the dark,
light lost to the stars
and the city far behind us,
we travel the barren highway
toward a distant promise.
The moon gleams cold as ice.

On a looming hilltop,
a lone steer stands, starkly
black against the dimness behind it.
The unfenced land crowds close,
the highway an inky ribbon
stretching into the night.

Nothing thrives in this desert,
in this unforgiving land
along the road to somewhere else.
Time waits frozen, as unyielding
as the desolation
of this lonely, forgotten place.

Wakeful, I watch the hills unfold,
mark a field light's deathly glow.
Ghost songs on the radio
float up through the static
in this in-between nowhere
caught so very far from home.


--/--

If you enjoyed this entry, please vote for it in the poll here.

Comments

[halfshellvenus]

Oh, this would have been an actual cow, just somehow separated from the herd. There's a lot of free-range grazing in that region, and some of the cattle really roam away from everyone else.

I still wonder about those lights mounted on poles-- maybe one every 10 or 20 miles, randomly placed on the side of a hill. What were they for? There was nothing to illuminate. They somehow made those areas even bleaker than they already were!

Thanks for reading and commenting! It's especially nice for poetry, which sometimes feels as if it gets overlooked.

[roina_arwen]

I asked hubby about the lights (he spent part of his youth on a small farm, and also knows a lot of odd facts) and he says:

“It's probably pump lights. Windmills are placed randomly to pump water for livestock. Lights which are powered by the windmills are placed over the tanks at the base of the windmills. At least that's what it sounds like to me.”

He added that he would have to see it to know for sure, because the other option is “It could also be some sort of utility access. Outside on the plains in the middle of the night, they sometimes have solitary lights, indicating where their equipment is. Keeps them from having to search around in the dark for it.”

So if that doesn’t solve your mystery, at least it narrows it down!

[halfshellvenus]

Yes, it does! It makes much more sense than "adding to the gloom." As I remember it, there weren't any windmills but might have been small sheds next to some of them. An equipment shed--I can see wanting to know where that is. In the daytime, the pole itself would be a kind of marker.

Thanks!