I found God nailed beneath the tracks,
His gospel stained with coal and rain.
The preacher said the country was blessed.
The railroad ghosts asked,
Blessed for whom?
A rusted spike held Genesis down
beneath a depot eaten by kudzu,
where the ticket window sold only silence
and the clock had stopped
at the hour the factory closed.
I pulled the iron from the pages.
The earth coughed up a century.
There were Chinese bones beneath the mountains,
Black hands beneath the cotton,
Irish blood beneath the bridges,
Indigenous nations beneath the maps,
and a thousand nameless men
who laid the tracks
but never owned the destination.
I asked the ghost of a railroad baron
why his name was carved in marble
while theirs dissolved in mud.
He adjusted his silk necktie
and called it progress.
I asked the preacher
why heaven needed so many poor men
to build rich men's kingdoms.
He said suffering made us holy.
I asked the sheriff
why a hungry man stealing bread was a criminal
but stealing a mountain
made you a businessman.
He reached for his gun.
So I boarded a midnight freight
with a Bible, a harmonica,
and a pocketful of unanswered questions.
At every crossing,
the dead climbed aboard.
A coal miner without lungs.
A sharecropper without land.
A child with factory dust in her hair.
A woman whose husband disappeared
into the machinery of prosperity.
They sang no anthem.
They sang the names
the history books had misplaced.
And somewhere beyond the last switchyard,
I understood the terrible joke:
The country had never lacked miracles.
It had simply mistaken
the men who counted the money
for the men who made the bread.
At dawn, I drove that railroad spike
into the courthouse steps.
Not to crucify another god.
Not to claim another kingdom.
But to hang one question
where every passing citizen
would have to see it:
If this land was built by everyone,
why does it belong to so few?
Then I walked west
along the abandoned tracks,
while the ghosts followed behind me,
and the rusted iron
rang like a church bell
that had finally learned
to question its own sermon.