Broken Plow - Chris Knight

Load up the old dodge truck

We’ll leave what we can’t sell

Nobody needs a sharecropper’s tools

Or a dust filled well

Take you one last look around

Shed you one last tear

For the broken plow, the broken dreams

And the life we’re leaving here

Pull the lines down tight

The kids can ride on top of the load

In the cool of the night

They can crawl underneath the tarp

To stay out of the cold

Eleven hundred miles of mountain and sand

We’ll cross 'em tired and torn

If this beat up truck can carry us

Far enough away from the storm

We’re going to California

There’s work there for a man

Too proud to beg for charity

Too poor to make a stand

Pray it’s just the land we’re losing

Not my life’s blood that I leave

On the handles of that broken plow

That haunts me in my dreams

A man at a roadside station

Don’t like dealing with my kind

He’d beat me out of my last dollar

And never look me in the eye

I heard 'em call us okies

Hell I don’t know what that means

But something tells me the promised land

Ain’t as promising as it seems

This restless road is full of strangers

They ain’t no stranger than I am

Hardened faces damn the dust and curse the wind

That drove us from this life and home

We’ll never know again

On the handles of my broken plow that haunts me in my dreams