New Jersey is Nova Caesarea beneath the asphalt. A prophecy in reverse. Black Cloud and the Council-of-Concerned-Conservationists light the way back.

BLACK CLOUD SPEAKS

—Chief Poetic Justice Warrior of the Council-of-Concerned-Conservationists

They named her Nova Caesarea, you know.

That’s not just a name—it’s a clue.

Not New Jersey. Not Exit 9. Not Sbarro and sadness. But Nova Caesarea. The new Caesar’s land. The imperial echo on a little spit of marsh and shore. And as the story goes, they gave it that name with hope in their hearts and Latin in their throats—before the golf carts, before the synthetic turf, before the cul-de-sacs swallowed the ancestral trails.

And here’s the silver lining, children of the sprawl:

Every act of overdevelopment is an accidental preservation project.

Every corporate plaza is its own glass coffin, holding in suspension the soil beneath it—unweathered, unwalked on, waiting.

And when the towers fall (and they will fall),

and the human tide pulls back to wherever it came from,

what remains will not be nothing.

It will be the memory of something.

And memory, my friends, is a seed.

The Normans never left.

The Southern Italians just disguised themselves as paving contractors and pizza kings.

And the Lenape—they are listening. Waiting. Smiling faintly when you say “Raritan” and don’t know why.

Even the name New Jersey carries the hidden whisper of empire.

The English named it after the Channel Island of Jersey—

a rocky outpost off the coast of Normandy,

where the Roman name Caesarea still clung like old salt to the cliffs.

Jersey was Norman land before it was English land, and before that, it was Roman in dream if not in fact.

https://westjersey.org/wjh_nova.htm

So in a roundabout way, every time someone curses the Turnpike or the Parkway, they’re cursing in the name of the Caesars—and the Normans too.

The old world always leaks through.

This isn’t just nostalgia.

It’s prophecy in reverse.

Because the past isn’t gone.

It’s compost.

And somewhere beneath the Wegmans parking lot is a cracked oyster shell, a piece of Lenape flint, and a bronze Roman coin carried over in a settler’s shoe—all of them humming. All of them saying: We’re still here. You just forgot how to look.

So go ahead. Shop. Build. Pave.

Just know you’re laying down the topsoil for the Second Bloom.

Nova Caesarea is not a ruin.

It’s a chrysalis.

And the butterflies will be wearing leather sandals and yelling in dialect.

The Council-of-Concerned-Conservationists was founded for places like this—where history folds over itself like sediment, where the ancient rises again in the cracks of the modern. We are not here merely to mourn the old order, but to steward its renewal—to tend the embers smoldering beneath the blacktop.

And if I sound like I speak with personal conviction—

well, I should.

I came of age here, between the factories and the marshes, where the Lenape once settled near the springs.

New Jersey formed my gloomy outlook—always looking for a silver lining under the blacktop, a whisper of older life behind the warehouses.

I used to climb junkyard fences, half-scared of the dogs that barked and chased along the chain-link, just to get back to the sandy rise where the Lenape camped and kept their smoky fires in April, curing the herring that ran upstream like living silver.

Some days you found old glass, or a piece of broken pottery, or an arrowhead chipped thin and sharp like a thought someone left behind.

That’s how it gets you—you start looking for lost things, and pretty soon you’re the one who’s found.

The gray skies, the wild vines clawing the chain-link fences, the stubborn salt marshes still breathing just beyond the clamor—

they wrote themselves into me.

And so it is my joy, and my burden, to believe:

Nova Caesarea will bloom again.