We don’t walk anymore.
Neighborhoods missing neighbors,
grids and blocks
sealed by six-lane rivers,
children warned not to cross.
We don’t walk anymore.
Shops on islands
in seas of parking lots,
blacktop deserts radiating heat,
burning souls, blistering steps.
We don’t walk anymore.
We drive to gyms,
run on machines facing screens,
while sparrows stitch
small songs through silence.
Our bodies move,
our spirits stall.
We don’t walk anymore.
Ground buried
beneath tar and oil,
our slaughter.
Still we pave,
still we burn,
still we wonder why
air is heavy,
souls sag,
sun cruel.
We don’t walk anymore.
We arrive
but never belong.
Lament the Loss
For me, a lament is a cry of grief. It names what has been lost and holds sorrow without trying to fix it. In many traditions, laments speak for both the individual and the community, giving voice to what feels unbearable so it is not forgotten.
When I write in this way, I am mourning the places we’ve built that have erased what matters most. I am grieving neighborhoods missing neighbors, streets too dangerous to cross, land buried under blacktop. Each return to the phrase we don’t walk anymore is my way of circling back to the absence, to what has slipped away.
A lament doesn’t offer answers. It witnesses.
Poet Feature: Terry Tempest Williams
I find Terry Tempest Williams’s voice quietly powerful, rooted in the American West, carried by the desert wind, and tuned to both personal grief and ecological witness. Her lyrical nonfiction, including Refuge, Finding Beauty in a Broken World, and Erosion, weaves the landscapes of Utah with spiritual and political insight. She does not just write about land; she writes from it. Her work confronts environmental loss, family histories marked by cancer, and the moral urgency of wilderness preservation. For me, her writing shows how words can be both elegy and prayer.
To explore her work further, visit her official website: terrytempestwilliams.com
