Zita Horton

Look around you as you travel on the roads that cross this nation-
there’s a new crop springing up that needs an explanation.
Though I don’t know who’s the planter, or whose hand dug the hole,
this crop of small white crosses brings a sadness to my soul.

Each is a small memorial, a cairn to mark the place
where someone else’s loved one met their Maker face to face,
and the passers-by just pass on by this mournful, solemn sight
and ignore the slight reflection from their headlights in the night.

Do they ever spare a sidelong glance, or slow their constant pace
to ponder on what tragedy once happened in this place?
Or speculate whose wavering hand inscribed that name and date
through tear-dimmed sight, and rage-filled mind, against the hand of fate.

Does a memory pierce a mother’s heart each time she passes here,
or a farmer on his way to town still shed a silent tear -
does the trucker, to his missing mate still bid a last good-bye
with a blast upon his air horn, to assail both plain and sky?

For the nightmare keeps recurring for those who have survived -
a screech of brakes, a crash of glass - and everything’s revived.
We plot our nation’s road toll, not on a graph by hand,
but in the trail of small white crosses spread about this wide brown land.