Ghost Towns

Ghost Town,
by Edythe Hope Genee

Lingering shafts of a parching desert sun
Cast eerie shadows on the crumbling walls;
An air of brooding silence hovers close,
Unbroken by a sound or voice of man.
A door bangs loosely on a rusty hinge,
As dusk creeps forward through the purple sage,
And high Sierra, etched in saffron mist,
Press nearer to the mouldy parapets.

O songs of ages past - is this the clay
That once was Angel's Camp and Rhyolite?
When wine flowed free - when lips and laughing eyes
Flashed through these dusty desert corridors?
Where are they now - the feet that walked these streets?
Do paths of gold still lure them farther on,
Or stay their steps beneath a burning sky
To muted silence in this painted sand?


"Ghost Towns Of The West" is a great Sunset book published by Lane Magazine and Book Co. in 1971.

Bodie State Historic Park celebrates it's 5oth year as a State Park this year. Tomorrow, August 11th, is Friends Of Bodie Day. When we were at the California State Fair, a gentleman who is a volunteer there visited our booth (which was next door to the Mono county exhibit, the one with the stagecoach I showed in my post on the 4th), and he was telling us about it. I haven't been to Bodie in years. I think I'd rather go when it wasn't so danged hot.

"Big Bad Bodie" by James Watson and Doug Brodie was published by Robert D. Reed Publishers.
I think I found the "Ghost Town Atlas", below at a thrift store. Written by Robert Neil Johnson, it was first published in 1967 by Cy Johnson and Son.

(I found the poem in this post in my book "Brief Aprils" , which I have written about before. It is full of Ms. Genee's poems, and was printed in 1947.)