Where pluff mud meets the salt and rot beneath the hanging moss, An old man sits and counts the years and measures out the loss. His guitar is a graveyard where the permanent ink stays, A ledger of the songs he wrote for long-forgotten days. He views the modern skyline like a cold and stranger’s face, A ghost who haunts the edges of a vastly altered place; With nothing left to cling to as the heavy shadows creep, Save a heartbreak far too weighted and too restless for sleep.
He spoke of when a neighbor was a lifeline to your soul, When the river was the heartbeat and the land was wild and whole. He shared a hundred memories of a grace that’s been outgrown, Before the town was bartered and the seeds of greed were sown. Yet through the tales of kindness and the lore of days of yore, One bitter truth is ringing: “There ain’t no Bluffton in Bluffton no more.”
We would have gladly helped him, tried to ease his weary load, As he wandered down the shoulder of a newly-paved-over road. But he offered us a warning and a chilling, dark decree: He’d never grant a favor or a kindness back to me, Unless I found the power to turn back the hands of time, To a day before the “progress” and the commercialized climb. “I’d help you,” came his murmur with a distant, hollow stare, “But favors are for locals who were actually once there— For those who go back deep enough, the rooted and the free, Who once sat long ago upon my grandmother’s old knee.”
Your blood turns into ice within that pluff-mud-scented breeze, For his grandmother is buried in the roots of ancient trees. To sit upon her knee is just to sit upon the air, To reach for ghosts and memories that are no longer there. It is a test of spirit and a gate that’s locked and cold, To a world that vanished long ago before the heart was sold.
The Bluffton that he knows is not in merchant-driven greed, The politician’s promise or the off-year-voting seed. It isn’t in the shiny paint of some new weekend boat, But in the stranger’s shared bread and the neighborly note. He knows the heart is beating where the rising river flows, Deep within the secrets that the swaying cordgrass knows. But he stares at the pavement as he shuts the final door, ‘Cause there ain’t no Bluffton in Bluffton no more.