Headframe

As I drove the Northern Highway
I picked up an elderly stranger walking
The most desolate stretch of road,
And as we traveled sharing a smoke
He spoke of a place he saw in his youth,
Of a looming granite ridge, barren
Above the treeline,  a vast gray face
Scarred by eons of water, wind and ice,
Dark and foreboding against
An endless white sky
He said:
"Where the rock shoots up like a fist 
From the frozen ground there stands
A timber headframe, the only marker
For a long-dead mine; its shaft filled
With broken boulders and all about
No birds, no animals, only the
Constant Northwest wind that swung
On the headframe's shattered timbers
A sign proclaiming through its rust:
"A Better Future for the North."