Downtown Fairbanks/Wikimedia Commons
The whining, can you hear it?
The screech and the wail,
A man can’t help but fear it;
It screams of time to bail
From the car-filled Chugach bowl
with its ugly, dusty roads;
To McMansion Hillside yards
with grizzlies now stalking the abodes
The losers and the quitters,
wrapped in spirits down,
choose to blubber incessantly
and quiver and bawl and frown
There is almost nothing
about which they do not shout;
The media din speaks clearly
of the time come to get the hell out:
“The criminals are everywhere;
“I’m afraid to leave my room;
“The recession is so bad;
“We are surely facing doom
“The government saviors,
“they don’t really care;
“All they do is strut and preen
“and pat their pretty hair.”
This is a new Los Anchorage,
the city so Alaska near,
that’s lost the Alaska spirit
in all but microbrewery beer.
So I’m gone,
vamoose,
taken off,
on the loose.
The Golden North beckons;
There’s a city there with pluck;
On the banks of the river Chena,
it battles on despite hard luck
Maybe it’s the cold
of this bitter frozen hell,
that steels the inhabitants,
so they do not sit and dwell
Silly though they may be,
shivering in the dark,
the North to the Future claim
is here taken as no lark.
Riches remain to be found
in this Godforsaken land;
A man can still hit pay dirt
buried ‘neath the sand
So let the quitters quit,
and retreat to states of old;
The weak have no place
among the tough and bold
Fairbanks is a city
that should by rights be dead,
and yet its heart beats strongly
powered by a survivor’s cred
The whiners here
do not survive for long;
If they cannot hack it,
they are quickly gone.
No one has the time
to listen to their bawl;
The woe-is-me complaining
leaves no one in their thrall.
It’s too much wasted energy
in this land of gold,
where all one’s energy
is needed to battle with the cold.
With apologies to Robert Service.
And it’s humor. The relocation is as temporary as the poetry is bad.
