A Lamentation for the City of Kingsport

This is doggerel. It has to be. Serious poetry about city planning codes is bad doggerel; Bad Poetry about city planning codes is deliberate doggerel, unashamed. Perhaps the novelty and audacity of doggerel being written without shame will get some attention. I hope so. Bad Poetry is usually light, but this situation, as suggested by the prompt at Poets & Storytellers Unlimited, is one that brings me to tears. More or less regularly. Any time I'm in a car pool that's not able to bypass the former shoppng attraction, as most of them do.

Why didn't I think of a poem about something that made me laugh? I gave that idea forty-eight hours, and then someone's posts at another forum started this thing going in my mind, instead. I'll probably think of something funny later. The trouble with me is that, although the situation itself has made me cry, the idea of writing doggerel about it does make me laugh, in a tasteless and embarrassing way. As noted before, I've been afflicted with sarcasm all my life.

More to the point...this is Sunday, but is this Christian content? For me it most definitely is Christian content, despite its not containing specifically Christian words. Jesus identified with the poor. A neighborhood that excludes poor people would, by definition, exclude Jesus. Nufsed I hope.

"A Zoning Ordinance we have not needed

Two hundred years, nor do we need it now."

"You need it," says the dictatorial state that's

Excluded from the Commonwealth by vow.

County officials promised to repeal it,

Then yawned, "What need? It's never been enforced.

We can collect more packages of funding

If from it we're not formally divorced."

I've seen such things at work in other places.

They start in bigotry and end in blight.

The lie's that money makes more pleasant faces.

The truth: expenses put good will to flight.

Not far from here, there is a Model City.

It had its plans and zoning from the start.

People moved in where planners meant to put them.

It was a triumph of the planner's art.

The nearest part to us of all this city

Was what they called, lightheartedly, "Snob Hill."

It had a proper name; that doesn't matter now.

It was a terrace laid out just to fill

With bigger, better houses each row upward.

My parents married when the place was new.

My mother thought she might like to retire there,

About three-quarters up, on every view.

And when my father died she bought a house there,

For that was where she was a private nurse,

And all her patients' friends were on a long list

Of jobs she might take when that case grew worse.

For by the time they moved up on the Terrace

They'd proved resistance to all kinds of ills

Except Old Age, and that they all did gracefully,

With hardly any aches, or pills, or bills.

And they could pay enough to make house payments

And yardmen's wages and tennis club fees.

And they were close to all the nicest churches,

And schools, and parks, and everything to please.

And visiting, at first, I thought "What madness!

'Nice' neighborhoods in sight of factory stacks?

What cruel ways to gouge old folk for money

Occur to city planners--tacky hacks!"

But then a young man lost all of his income,

And neighbors found odd jobs that he could do

While he was mending; baby-sat his children,

And gave him lifts, and sometimes paid bills, too.

And then somebody's daughter's husband left her;

Of course she and the children moved right in,

Then everyone helped their grandmother spoil them,

And no one blamed them for their father's sin.

And then one of them couldn't make house payments.

A competiton started! "Live with me!"

The dear old ladies came almost to cat-fights

Before this mortal coil set that one free.

And so I saw the Terrace was not merely rich,

But really had "developed" something good,

And if the old dears bought more than they needed,

At least they lived in a nice neighborhood.

And then the median age of them reached ninety,

Prospective patients dropping off like flies,

And Mother said, "It's good to see some children

In the neighborhood again," with happy sighs.

And then, oh then, the blight of city planning

Rose from its pit and shook its ugly head;

"We must do something to attract more billionnaires

To keep our neighborhoods so 'nice'," they said.

Somewhere someone had found a batty billionnaire

Who wanted to improve plans that were great,

And in place of a shopping plaza, down-at-heel,

Put in a Tower to rent under Section Eight.

All mothers die too young, however old they are,

But I am glad mine never had to see

What that bleep billionnaire did to her neighborhood.

What does he care? Live right in town? Not he!

And now we see the addicts living on the street

Because, though "housed," they can't find their way home,

And piles and puddles of filth form around them

Until a fire hose goads them on to roam.

They don't go far. They can't. Best thing about them

Is that they can't go on this way for long.

Their lives already written off, they lie and wait

For the Dark Angel to right their last wrong.

The Towers have bedbugs, have tuberculosis,

And up the Terrace they climb, carrying those.

They've grown accustomed to sleeping behind stores;

The open air lures them away from Towers' woes.

I used to walk out there just for a visit.

It was a pleasant place to spend the day.

We'd stroll beside the river and go shopping.

Now "Keep me from that cesspit, Lord!" I pray.

The individual addicts, whores, and convicts

Cannot survive to blight the place for long.

The town already knows Blacks and Latinos

Have choices other than the slum's dead wrong.

But people think that filth, noise, and diseases

Are just to be expected from the poor.

How quickly they forget! The Terrace never

Attracted people born to wealth galore.

Before the prosperous, generous retirement

Most of them worked in the factories when young;

They thought "just being a housewife" was a luxury,

A fantasy not lived, to which they clung.

And, once retired, how much would be left over,

House payments, wages, club fees being paid?

The further up the hill, I think, the more of them

Depended on their children, still in trade!

Must widows pay for twelve rooms and a tennis club

To have a safe and friendly place to stroll?

Bosh! In my town they get that with a trailer house.

The sales pitch? Not even quaint, just stale and droll!

The way to build and keep a pleasant neighborhood

Is not to think of incomes and expense,

But of the things you want neighbors to do, or not,

And then make neighborhood rules that have some sense.

There can be rules about noise and untidiness,

About how late kids roam outdoors at night,

About which words a sober person does not say,

Excluding every kind of urban blight,

And people whose ground floors still hide a trailer's wheels

Will vote in such laws, and by them abide.

When people make their own rules and agree on them

They're strict indeed, on all who would reside.

But when they think that money's what buys niceness

Then desperation rises with expense,

So in "exclusive" neighborhoods in cities

The young design new drugs to sell for rents.

And when they think that money's what buys niceness

They ban the working parents with the whores,

And grandparents with medical expenses

Find themselves and possessions set out doors,

And who comes in? No tycoons, no landowners,

No poets, painters, nor weavers of rugs,

But money-grubbing slumlords and embezzlers,

And those who've made a pile in booze or drugs.

And neighborhoods expensive and exclusive

Are hardly safer at night than the slums,

And a child who had strayed from parents' loving care

Would, of the two, be safer among the bums.

Why give the poor excuses to be trashy?

Why give the rich excuses to be snobs?

Do people become more pleasant to live with

Merely because they're picked for better jobs?

No! Rules for neighborhoods' codes of behavior

Must be, and stricter's better, most will say,

But never mistake ill-got wealth for niceness.

The town near us did that; oh, how they pay!