Broken Plow

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