Robert Frost once said "Just specimens is all New Hampshire has/ One each of everything as in a show-case/Which naturally she doesn't care to sell." Robert Crawford's "Town Roads" is one of those specimens.

 TOWN  ROADS

At each town line the old town roads change names

To take the name of where you're coming from:

The Chester Road will bring you into Derry,

Derry Road ends at the Chester green.

Confusion wasn't built in by design ¬

The roads were laid like spokes on wagon wheels

To serve the farms that long ago moved west ¬

But this arrangement's hard on travelers

Who simply want to get from place to place.

What these towns need is a Copernicus

To tell them that the center lies without,

And agencies to legislate that roads

That run between them share a common name.

And yet, when sitting on the bench behind

Two cannons and a monument to boys

Who went, when asked, to save the wider world,

But never came back down these wrong-named roads,

I see the possibility: perhaps 

The towns were right.  All roads don't lead to Rome;

The do, however, radiate from home.

 This poem first appeared in The Dark Horse. Poem copyright 2004 by Robert Crawford